


Encore and Improvisation

by 23Murasaki



Category: Tales of the Abyss
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, At least that's what Luke's aiming for, Complete, Count Gardios has a character tag and Mary doesn't that's dumb, Does anything good happen on Hod?, First two chapters are for bbtales 2016 but there's gonna be more, Fun With Isofons, Gen, God Generals in general are a bad thing, Groundhog Day, Happy TOTA day yall, I apologize for Saphir's lack of punctuation, I have typed Grants so many times it doesn't look like a name anymore, I said ALL THE CHARACTERS and I meant it, I'm pretty sure that's not how fonons work BUT HERE WE GO ANYWAY, I'm so sorry, LADIES AND GENTS WE HAVE AN ANTAGONIST, Lorelei is a dick, Luke Dies So Much, Luke is Too Old For This, More characters eventually, Sort of at least, The Keterberg Crew are human disasters, Time Travel Fix-It, Too many Lukes, Vandesdelca Musto Fende also isn't a character tag oops, YOU get a God General and YOU get a God General, You know who's cool? Nephry., bbtales, blame Jade for everything it's canon anyway, can we talk about how badass Professor Nebilim is in her backstory?, he gets better?, i'm not tagging ships because all the ships are the canon ones anyway, i'm stretching out this "suspense" too much i'm sorry i just need to put people places, is it canon what Dr Gneiss and Dr Balfour are doctors of? because it seems to be everything, it is done, no i see how this could confuse people but I swear the tags aren't a lie, sort of, starting in chapter 3, that is to say ALL THE CHARACTERS, the Score makes no sense so that's how this plot is going to go, the hod plot is now done now there's just the apocalypse, the score is funny like that I type while crying, there are too many blonde people in this game wtf, there are too many ions send help, vague vagueness is vague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-07-26 02:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 31,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7555768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/23Murasaki/pseuds/23Murasaki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because this fandom doesn't have enough "Luke goes back in time to fix things because Lorelei and stuff" fics, right?</p>
<p>Luke fon Fabre dies on Eldrant, and that isn't quite the way Lorelei wanted it to go. If Lorelei had a concept of disaster, it would have applied it just then. Better try again. After all, Lorelei exists at all points in time, and both the past and the future, history and the Score, are memories to it. </p>
<p>So, Luke fon Fabre dies on Eldrant, and then he wakes up again–</p>
<p>And again–</p>
<p>And again–</p>
<p>...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The End?

Luke Fon Fabre dies on Eldrant. That’s alright. He’s the scion of Lorelei. If anyone can exist beyond death, it’s him. He dies smiling.

————

Luke wakes up slumped over a table on the Tartarus, and he panics. That time, he dies much sooner, trying to plead with the God General who wears his face.

————

The next time he wakes up on the Tartarus, he keeps his head. He makes it all the way to the mines of Akzeriuth, and dies tackling Van into the miasma. It’s not what he wanted to do.

————

Luke wakes up on the Tartarus. He dies fighting – pointlessly, this time, so pointlessly.

————

Luke wakes up on the Tartarus. He needs to tell Jade something– anything – he needs an excuse for crying. Jade doesn’t believe him, but they go down fighting – and they get so far, so very far – back to back. It’s something. It’s not enough, but it’s something.

————

Luke wakes up on the Tartarus. He pleads his case to Tear, but it’s not like she trusts him, not at this point in time. Lorelei, Lorelei is the solution, isn’t it?

… Luke Fon Fabre dies on Eldrant.

————

He wakes up– Luke refuses to wake up on the Tartarus. He wakes up in Choral Castle. That’s new. His body is small and weak, and he can see Asch strapped to a table. Two men in white coats are standing over him– one of them is Spinoza. It takes a moment longer to realize the other one as Dist.

Luke tries to stall, tries to argue– He probably would have gotten somewhere, had Van not walked in.

“I didn’t expect it to talk,” says Dist lamely. Van frowns.

“I see,” he says.

————

Luke wakes up in Choral Castle. He keeps his mouth shut, even through all of Van’s tests. He keeps his mouth shut until Guy finds him, then looks up at his mother with wide eyes and asks where the other him is. He can fix this.

He waits with bated breath as his parents search for Asch and argue with Van. He’s kidnapped again while he’s still too small to fight back, and he soon finds himself strapped to a familiar machine.

“I’d like to study you more, you know,” says Dist. “But it isn’t my call.”

They break his back. He lives, lives, lives– it’s not like he needs to walk to know the truth. Guy helps. So does Natalia.

Tear attacks her brother in the courtyard, one day, and oh mercy Luke doesn’t feel seventeen, he feels so much older, but he’s still there and Van grabs him like a shield, and then the hyper-resonance rings like eternity.

“I’m sorry,” says Tear. “I don’t know what happened.”

“I do,” Luke replies. “That is, I’ve read about it.” Her eyes light up slightly.

He dies in Akzeriuth, that time, and it’s such a waste.

————

Luke wakes up in Choral Castle, and fights all the way. He’s desperate for change, and leaves a trail of chaos and destruction all the way to Van’s dead body. Then, he lives until he’s fourteen, physically, and war breaks out with Malkuth. Jade is a powerful ally, but he’s an ever more powerful enemy, and he tears through battalions of White Knights with a terrifying ease.

It’s nice, honestly, that it’s not Jade who kills him. A dark-skinned girl soldier, no older than sixteen, plunges a sword into Luke’s chest.

“For Hod,” she spits.

————

He wants to wake up earlier. He wakes on a collapsing island. He dies on the collapsing island.

————

Luke wakes in Choral Castle. That time is less of a disaster, if only because he can’t summon up the energy to argue with anyone for a very long time. He wants to save everyone, but there’s nothing he can do– not for Hod, not for Akzeriuth, not for the world.

He jumps to protect Van, because that’s the script. Tear chides him for being too passive, later, but he has energy enough to warn Jade about the ambush. They detour. Luke lies, lies, lies, lying is second nature when everyone thinks you’re a child but you’re so much older now. He prevents what he can, says all the right things, lies there at night pretending not to see Jade pretending not to watch him suspiciously.

Anise doesn’t betray them, not this time, because Luke heads her off and pays off her debts.

Anise doesn’t betray them. Guy does. Guy doesn’t have anyone to hold him back this time.

————

Luke wakes up in Choral Castle. He does everything right this time, as his heart breaks for all of those shattered lives. He does everything right. It’s still not enough, and that’s the worst part.

He faces the end with Guy and Tear and Anise and Ion and Jade and Natalia and Asch and Sync and Arietta and even Largo, and it’s still the end, the world still ends, slowly and painfully.

He tells them the truth, in the end. Jade looks at him askance, and asks how many times he has lived.

“Too many,” Luke mutters. “I saw Hod fall.”

“It doesn’t start on Hod, though,” says Jade. He’s the only one who is still calm, possibly because he can’t be anything else. “The war didn’t even start on Hod.”

The world ends on Hod, though. On the replica Hod. It’s some sort of symbolic.

————

Jade has a point, though– it’s Van’s story, Guy’s story, Tear’s story, all of those that start on Hod. Hod is the end of a war. Hod is the end of an era. Luke needs to find the beginning of one, like Choral Castle. He doesn’t want to wake up there.

Images fly by him in an iridescent stream– people and places that have become so very familiar to him. Choral Castle swirls around him, but he pushes past it and through it. Hod collapses in slow motion, full of golden light and glory and suffering. It pulls at him, the echo of that hyperresonance. It’s the same as him, it seems to say, it speaks the same language and fills itself with the same power. When he pulls away, he feels like he’s falling back, back, back, head over heels.


	2. Keterberg

Luke wakes up sick, so very sick. His entire body shakes when he tries to move it, and he bites his own tongue when he tries to grit his teeth. Stupid stupid stupid! He shouldn’t have done that, should have given it another go from Choral Castle, not gone and done this. It couldn’t possibly had been worse than it’s already been. He’s too dizzy to even tell where he is, but when he gets his breath back enough to think, he is seized with an overwhelming urge to get out.

Out to where? Out how? He can’t answer either of those questions, but he needs to get out, so he runs. And then he keeps running until his legs give out and he blacks out face down in the snow.

————

“No, see? He’s breathing, somewhat,” says a voice from above Luke’s head. It’s a child’s voice, but the cold tone make it sound much older. Mercy, they’re all children, whoever they are, children who don’t know what the future can hold.

“Oh,” says another. “What, um, what do we do? If he’s hurt we should tell Professor, right?” A beat. “W-what?”

“I do not see any visible injuries. It is more likely that he is ill.”

“He’s kind of turning blue,” says the second voice uncertainly. “That’s… he may have frostbite, do you think, Jade?”

“Hm,” says… Yeah, that’s probably Jade. His Jade. “I suppose so. That’s boring.”

“What do we do, though?” And that, presumably, is Dist the Reaper, age somewhere-under-ten, if the good professor is still alive.

“Don’t care. Do whatever you like. A human being isn’t of any use to me. Professor won’t let me experiment on them.” There is a high-pitched whine in response to that. “Oh, shut up,” Jade adds.

“Mister?” That’s addressed at Luke, but he can’t move any part of his body to respond. “Mister, I– I’m pretty sure you alive, so I’m gonna take you to Keterberg, okay?” Finally he manages to open his eyes a crack. Everything’s white and everything’s blurry, but there is a vague outline of a person leaning over him. Good enough. He blacks out again.

————

Luke blacks back in to the awareness that he’s on a bed. It’s warm and soft and there is a distinct aroma of roses of some sort. He’s definitely not dead, then.

“– pneumonia is not something one can just heal away, my dears,” a woman is saying. She sounds rather amused. “If he’s sick, he will need to see a doctor. If he’s just hurt, then he’s all better now because I promise I patched him up.”

“Promise-promise?” Dist whines. As an adult, his voice is high. As a child, the pitch borders on the painful.

“Promise-promise,” confirms the woman. “Now, go help Jade make some tea. He always makes it too strong.” Dist trots away obediently, and the woman approaches Luke’s bedside. He opens his eyes, and is momentarily struck dumb. She’s beautiful. She is so beautiful. It’s not any one thing about her– she has nice eyes, a deep shade of red, and her hair curls around her shoulders elegantly – but she is heartstoppingly, impossibly beautiful.

“Hello,” he says intelligently. There’s not much else to say to someone whose death is sort of the impetus to your creation. Professor Gelda Nebilim smiles down at him crookedly.

“Good evening,” she says. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

“How long did I…?” Luke’s throat is very dry. Luckily, he can still communicate his point.

“About six hours,” says Professor Nebilim. “Saphir’s been very worried.”

“Saphir…?” Oh, wait, Dist. That’s Dist. The idea that Dist is worried about him is a bit laughable, in context.

“One of the boys who found you on Mount Roneal,” she elaborates.

Jade materializes through a door behind her– round-faced and still dark-eyed, but very recognizable – holding a teapot. Dist– Saphir trundles along behind him, clutching teacups to his chest and looking very proud of himself. Conversation changes course abruptly, because there is some disagreement over teacups and Professor Nebilim needs to pour the tea. It smells good, and it warms and soothes his raw throat. 

“You aren’t dead,” Jade informs Luke flatly. He seems disappointed, if anything.

“Nope,” says Luke. He’s so very used to Jade being an adult, that speaking to this version is giving him the sort of headache he hasn’t had in lifetimes. “I hear you two dragged me down the mountain. Thank you.” He smiles at them. Jade doesn’t react. Dist giggles and waves his hands. Jade rescues his teacup handily.

“What do you say?” Professor Nebilim prompts.

“You’re welcome!” Dist half-sings.

“Yeah,” says Jade. “Can I go now?”

“Absolutely not,” says Professor Nebilim. “I think we all owe each other a few explanations, don’t you?” Dist’s face falls. Jade looks to the door like he’s calculating the distance. “And an introduction,” Nebilim adds, fixing Luke with an unreadable look. “What should we call you, stranger?”

“Luke,” Luke says. He can’t say Fon Fabre, not twenty-five years before his supposed birth, so he blurts out the first surname that crosses his mind. “Luke Grants.”

“Gelda Nebilim,” she says. “Boys, introduce yourselves, please.”

“Jade Balfour.” Said too quickly, in a disinterested tone. Colonel Jade Curtiss, Malkuth Military, Third Division enunciates his introduction with something akin to pride, but his younger self speaks almost carelessly.

“I’m Saphir!” A beat. “And now you say, ‘It’s nice to meet you!’, right?”

“Why were you on Mount Roneal? Tourists don’t go there, and you’re certainly not local,” Jade says.

“That’s not what you say! Professor, tell him that’s not what you say!”

“You’re right, Saphir, but Jade does have a point. I meant to ask you myself, Luke, but what exactly were you doing up that mountain?” All of these years, all of that time passed over and over again, and Luke still isn’t a very good liar. Not unless he can practice it beforehand, and this time he hasn’t had the chance.

“The sephiroth tree,” he blurts. “I’m investigating it– for Daath– because I am an Oracle Knight. Yes.” Professor Nebilim raises a perfect eyebrow. Jade examines his teacup critically.

“An Oracle Knight?” Saphir asks, wide-eyed. “Really? That’s so cool! You’re like Professor then, right? You’re classmates, only you don’t know each other!”

“It would make us more like schoolmates,” said Professor Nebilim pleasantly, a half-smile fixed on her face. It’s a familiar tone and expression, one that Jade replicates often as an adult. “But that’s not all that important. What does Daath want with the sephiroth?”

“Resonant fluctuations,” says Luke more confidently. That’s the sort of thing that tends to end a conversation. Saphir whispers something into Jade’s ear, and Jade shrugs.  
“My, my,” says Professor Nebilim. “I do hope you’re lying, Cantor Grants. If there are any fluctuations worth noting, it’s cause for concern.” She’s still smiling, but her eyes are narrow.

“Why’d he be lying?” Saphir asks. Jade shrugs again. He looks bored.

“Well, something fluctuated me in the face,” Luke says wearily. “I wasn’t expecting it.” That’s not entirely a lie. The professor scrutinizes him for a long moment, then sighs.

“Very well,” she says. “When you are well again, please escort me to the sephiroth. I worked in development, when I was in Daath. I may be of assistance to you.”

“I want to come,” Jade announces. “So does Saphir.”

“Oh. I do?” Saphir looks genuinely surprised.

“No, you don’t,” says the professor firmly. Jade frowns. “I’ll tell you if Cantor Grants find out anything interesting, though.” She says interesting the way Jade does.

————

Luke isn’t sure what he expected, but his reflection in the professor’s bathroom mirror looks almost unfamiliar. He’s older, that’s the first thing he – he’s never looked older than eighteen, fresh-faced and bright-eyed, and now he looks … weary. He’s older and his face is lined and his red hair is fading to dim gold, and his eyes– that’s the worst sort of thing, because they’re the same as they’ve ever been.

Then he almost jumps out of his skin because Jade is sitting in the window watching him.

————

There are odd fluctuations in the energy emitted by the sephiroth tree. Luke isn’t sure if he’s grateful that his story is holding up or concerned about what it might mean. Professor Nebilim’s eyebrows knit together as she scans the readings.

“Memory particles,” she murmurs. “How rude.”

“Does it mean something?” Luke asks.

“Everything means something, Cantor Grants,” she replies. “In this case, though, the meaning may be beyond me for the time being. Memory particles aren’t usually harmful, but we ought to keep monitoring their levels.” She frowns. “I haven’t seen something quite like this before.”

“Me neither,” says Luke honestly.

————

 

Dist– Saphir really is a cute kid. It’s even more surreal that meeting Professor Nebilim, or physically looking down at Jade. He’s curious about Daath, and even more curious about Dawn Age books and artifacts, and he hangs on Luke’s every word.

“I appreciate it,” says Professor Nebilim, two days in and directly after Luke has fudged a mostly sensible speech about flightstones. “He’s gotten quite fond of you.”

She’s right. Saphir now greets exactly four people by name: Jade, Nephry, Professor Nebilim, and Cantor Grants. That… that has the potential to be awful.

————

Peony is exactly the same no matter what age he is. He’s the first one who is willing to tell Luke the date and his own age, too. In fact, he’s quite willing to tell Luke anything about anyone.

“I’m ten and two-thirds!” the boy announces proudly. “I’m older than Jade and Saphir, I mean just a little bit, but still, so really I should be bossing them around, don’t you think?” Luke makes a noncommittal noise and Peony plunges onwards, undeterred. “Though I mean, everyone sort of bosses Saphir around. He’s a wuss. And people are scared of Jade but I don’t know why, he’s fun when he’s not trying to stab things.”

Time is short, then. Professor Nebilim is doomed to die before the year is up.

————

“You’re waiting for something,” Jade accuses, from his perch on the window. It doesn’t get any less creepy with time. At least Luke’s had a chance to practice his game face.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“You’re not here for the sephiroth tree. Or not only for it, anyway. You lied to Professor.” That’s a cardinal sin, obviously. Luke raises his eyebrows. “You’re waiting for something to happen. Does the Order of Lorelei send people like you out to make sure the Score happens?”

“Why would the Order do something like that?” Because that is an extremely specific accusation.

“Because the Score doesn’t happen on its own. I know that,” Jade says instantly. He opens his mouth to say something else, but clearly thinks better of it.

“I’m not here to make sure something happens,” says Luke. The boy still looks accusatory, so he elaborates. “I’m here to stop something bad from happening. I’m waiting for… for warning signs.”

“Then you don’t work for the Order,” says Jade simply. “It had to be one or the other.” He fixes Luke with a curious stare for a moment, then drops backwards out the window and into the night.

————

Three days later, all four of them corner and demand an explanation. Peony is the leading voice, of course.

“–So you absolutely need to tell us what the bad thing is,” Peony finishes. He’s been talking for the last five minutes. Nephry nods firmly.

“We won’t stop bothering you until you do,” she adds. Saphir holds out a notebook and a pen.

“If you don’t want to say it, you can write it,” he says a little shakily. “Professor says that’s easier sometimes.” They are all so young, still. Luke can’t really get over that. They are so young and time is so short and Luke is so tired.

“Professor is going to die,” he says bluntly. Saphir emits a high-pitched whine and sort of crumples onto the ground, and Peony gasps audibly. Nephry, bless her little heart, turns to look at her brother, who has gone completely still. Luke exhales. “Or she might, at least, if no one prevents it,” he adds. “And that’s why I’m here, okay? To make sure she doesn’t die, because she’s really important.”

“Oh,” says Jade. “You should have said that earlier. We can help.” He looks almost earnest, saying that, and that’s not an expression Luke has seen on his face before, not in any lifetime. Peony perks up significantly.

“Yeah! Definitely! Jade can help you– he’s a really strong fonist!” He beams and claps Jade on the shoulder.

They all pledge their support on the spot. It isn’t in the least bit comforting, even when Peony demands they draw up and sign a written contract.

————

He wishes he knew the exact date. That would make it easier, even though he’s probably tampered with the timeline enough to mess that up by now.

Days turn into weeks which turn into months, and Keterberg seems quiet and safe. Jade talks about fomicry, but only in the abstract, and Saphir giggles and calls it theory and introduces Luke to at least five almost identical fon machines, all of which have names. People, generally, seem fond of Cantor Grants.

————

Luke doesn’t mean to fall into a routine, but this lifetime is so different from any previous one, and he’s so far from everything he’s supposed to be fighting, that he just sort of forgets. No, that’s not the right word. He doesn’t forget, but he lets himself believe that he’s changed enough things already. He’s gone back so far, after all, and he must have already spread so many ripples–

And they’re so young –

And he’s so tired, Lorelei doesn’t get tired but he’s only human and he’s so very tired…

————

It’s almost four months later, and a snowstorm has left drifts that go up to Luke’s waist, and the sephiroth tree has calmed down, and Professor Nebilim lets him teach some of her students swordplay in the courtyard, and there’s a sense of disaster evaded in the air. The night air is clear, and Luke can sit in front of the inn and count the stars. They aren’t quite the same ones he remembers from Kimlasca, but that’s alright, they shine just as brightly and follow the same preordained paths. Guy used to draw him star charts, decades ago and decades to come, when Luke was very young.

He is thinking about star charts when he smells smoke and his blood goes colder the snow. Even as he leaps to his feet, he knows it’s too late, knows that flames are devouring Professor Nebilim’s home and the world is going to follow exactly the same disastrous path once again–

“Cantor Grants!” He almost doesn’t recognize Jade’s voice, though maybe it’s because it’s not what he’s expecting, but the boy leaps over a snowdrift and nearly crashes into him. “Cantor Grants– please! I– we need a healer– Professor said – I hadn’t meant for it to–“ He takes a deep breath, runs a hand helplessly over a burn on his face, then speaks more calmly. “Please come to Professor’s. We need a healer.”

Luke’s never run faster in his life. Certainly not in this life.

————

The building burns to the ground behind her as Gelda Nebilim cradles the limp body of one of her students. He’s torn almost in two, and the artes that swirl around them are not enough to do much more than keep him alive.

It takes three seventh fonists– or two seventh fonists and the Scion of Lorelei, depending on one’s perspective – to save his life, while Jade looks on in mild discomfort. Barely breathing on the bloody ground, Saphir doesn’t look like a future God General. He’s so very young– he looks a bit almost like Ion.

————

“It should have been me,” Professor Nebilim says very calmly some time later, once none of her children are dying or potential murders and she’s had a chance to change clothes. “Saphir pushed me out of the way– the poor silly boy. He’s so little. I could take a hit like that much more easily than he could.” She shakes her head.

“Lucky you were there, though,” says Luke, for lack of anything else to say. He feels like he’s drowning, like he’s failed yet again, like the world is going to end again and it will be his fault again, because he was the one who told a ten-year-old with attachment issues to try to save someone’s life.

“Yes,” she says. “Lucky that Jade didn’t do something like that with five children on a mountain or something, I suppose.”

————

On the subject of Jade, no one sees him for the next week. Luke leads the search party, which is made up of about three people with occasional support from Nephry and Peony, but they turn up nothing. It doesn’t feel like much of a success when Jade turns himself in at the end of the week, though Luke and Professor Nebilim do manage to get him released with just a warning, on account of his age.

No one sees Saphir for about a month, because he’s laid up in bed and Professor Nebilim has banned anyone from doing anything within twenty feet of him. And then he can’t walk. Professor Nebilim confines him to a chair, which he promptly straps an engine and wheels to. He’s remarkably chipper about the whole thing, once’s he’s been assured that no one else is hurt.

It’s a bit ridiculous to see him powering along down the street with Jade or Nephry happily riding on the back of the chair, but they seem pleased enough with this turn of events.

————

Jade turns up to class with a power limiter strapped to his wrist. No one questions that, at least.

————

The story has gotten out anyway, and there is a distant mention of a military officer coming up to Keterberg to see what all the fuss is about. Luke sends anonymous letters to Belkend and Sheridan recommending Saphir go work for them. Better Class I or Class M than the Malkuth army, anyway.

And then he leaves. He doesn’t really want to, even though Keterberg is frozen to the core and he thinks he smells smoke every time he closes his eyes. They’re so very young, and he’s so very tired, and there are so many things that could still go wrong– just here, just with them. But, logically speaking, there are more that can go wrong in other places and with other people. There are other people to stop from ruining everything. Largo’s out there somewhere– some twenty-five years younger and working as a mercenary. Maybe he already knows Natalia’s birth mother, maybe he’s waiting for his scored love and unscored doom. Van’s out there– he’s even younger, he must be, just a baby on Hod. There’s something terribly odd in that–

In how young they are.

————

He meets Brigadier Curtiss on his way south. He is old and weary, but there is a spark in his eyes, and he greets Luke like one old soldier greeting another. That’s what they both are, after all. Luke’s been Lorelei’s soldier, Lorelei’s sword and shield and scion, for technical decades. 

“Coming from Keterberg?” the man asks. Luke nods. “Funny stories coming out of the Silver World recently. Heard someone blew up half the town.”

“Wasn’t quite half,” says Luke. “And there weren’t any casualties.”

“Still. Deadly effective,” says Brigadier Curtiss. “And it was that kid, wasn’t it? Balfour?”

“Yep,” says Luke. He doesn’t say: But he’s so young! He doesn’t say: He can do so much worse, he can do so much better. He doesn’t say: It’s not in the Score. He doesn’t say: Jade Balfour can cause the end of the world. “He’s got a kid sister, you know,” Luke says. “Balfour does.” Curtiss grins.

“Does she blow up cities too?” he asks, like he wants to bring two weapons down to Grand Chokmah instead of just one. Luke grins back, because if this is done right he won’t get even one.

“Nah. They’re both good kids. Smart.” He spreads his hands. “I’d’ve taken them back to Daath with me, but that’s not in the Score.” Thank goodness it isn’t. Probably. Curtiss seems to consider this, and nods.

“I’ll see what’s what with the girl,” he says. “Daath certainly won’t get them.”

————

Tamara of Belkend, twenty-five years younger, looks almost the same as she does in the future. She walks past Luke without noticing him, and that’s probably how it’s supposed to be.

It’s not like she knows him.

————

Professor Nebilim writes to him when he’s in Chesodonia, and he’s really not sure how she got the address. She’s annoyed that he’s gotten her students stolen away, and demands he write to them regularly as penance.

They’re so young, and he left without saying goodbye properly, she scolds. Poor Saphir has been brought to tears by adults four times in a week, which is entirely unfair to everyone involved, Nephry won’t stop talking about going into politics, and they want to take Jade for the army. And at least part of this is his fault, so he is obligated to play the role of responsible adult and keep up correspondence.

That’s fine. He can do that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand check out this LOVELY illustration from the Big Bang: http://petitekleptomania.tumblr.com/post/147828341623/out-to-where-out-how-he-cant-answer-either-of


	3. Chesedonia

Luke hasn’t, that he recalls, died in Chesedonia. That’s a nice thought. Just for that, he likes Chesedonia. He books a room in the inn and writes rather stupid letters to Jade and Nephry and Saphir and Peony and Professor Nebilim. There isn’t much to write about. There are dust storms in the desert and he’s trying to figure out how to get to Kimlasca without a passport or how to get a fake passport or how long he can pass himself off as an Oracle Knight before someone clues into the fact that he isn’t really real– and he can only write about one of those things. 

Peony sends back a scrawled picture of the palace in Grand Chokmah with “you should come here instead” written across the back. Nephry, ever sensible, writes an actual little-kid letter and reminds Luke to drink plenty of water. Jade doesn’t write back. An anonymous adult answers Saphir’s letter for him and says the boy is deathly homesick when he’s not head-first in some machine, so all is probably well. 

Luke is seated in a bar perusing Professor Nebilim’s letter, which is detailed and includes the most recent data readings from the sephiroth tree in Keterberg when he’s reminded that he has six God Generals and Van to catch, not just one– if fomicry is never attempted on humans, that means no Sync, at least, and if Hod doesn’t fall for Guy’s sake that should take care of Arietta too, but there’s still Van and Largo and Legretta and the real Luke on Fabre and wars and deceptions and the real Ion, the Ion he never met… A young man with a scythe drops onto the barstool beside him, glances over the letter– and the letterhead that clearly says Keterberg on it, and grins.

“Got a sweetheart in Malkuth, Mister?” the young man asks.

“Just a friend,” says Luke firmly, because no matter how beautiful Professor Nebilim is the idea is downright discomfiting. She gets to be a beautiful abstract, a concept rather than a person. It doesn’t cross his mind for a few seconds that someone once had seen her die as a person and damned the world for her concept. 

“Pity,” the young man says, still grinning. “Not going home to her, then?”

“Probably not,” Luke hedges, because maybe he will end up retiring to Keterberg when everything is over. It seems like a nice place. He just needs everything to be over first, and that won’t happen for years and years and years. He looks more closely at the young man. This one is Guy’s age– that is, he looks to be the age Guy was the first time Luke died, because that’s always going to be the real right age for everyone to be in Luke’s head and that’s probably not good either. He’s dark haired and tall, taller than Guy, with the broad shoulders and square chin of a born soldier. Luke sets the letter down. “Home is around here somewhere anyway,” he admits. “Technically.” Choral Castle is somewhere close by, after all. It isn’t a lie.

“Huh, really?” the young man asks. “Mine’s on the other side of the border. Baticul.” He almost spits the city’s name, then waves down the bartender for a drink.

“Not a fan?” Luke asks.

“Of royals and that damn war-hawk Fabre? No,” he says. “If Kimlasca makes a move now, the trade routes shut down, and I’m out of a job.” He scratches his jaw uncomfortably. “And Baticul goes baying for war around once a year, you know, so everyone’s panicking. Again. If it’s in the Score anyway…” He trails off, and Luke nods in understanding, searching his rather fogged memory for information about Chesedonia. Chesedonia doesn’t fall, does it? Not to an army, anyway. No, no army every takes Chesedonia. Duke Fabre sacks Hod and Evanos brokers peace. 

“I know the Score,” Luke lies– half lies, because he knows his own memories and he knows Lorelei so it’s something. As soon as he says that, the young man beside him perks up. “I work for the Order, and you get that at a certain security clearance. Chesedonia has nothing to worry about. If Duke Fabre gets his way, they’ll invade Hod, not us.” 

“Cold comfort, that,” the young man says, then affects a pretentious tone. “Not to worry, you little peasants– when Kimlasca invades they’ll start with your neighbors, not with you.”

“That’s not what I meant,” says Luke. “If conditions are fulfilled, he won’t even reach Hod.” He hopes. He’s never seen those conditions fulfilled. He’s not sure what they could be. The young man grimaces.

“Damn foggy Score,” he says. “Mine says I get a Scored love and a daughter some day, but that’s pretty foggy too. Yulia had to speak Ancient Ispanian, huh? It’s probably like–” again with the voice “– In AD Whateverywhatever, the dude of something will cross a border with either an army or his own coat and then a nation will lose territory.” That’s… distressingly close to what Luke remembers the Score sounding like, actually, so he grins.

“No, no, it has to be the scion of the house of the untranslatable word,” he corrects. The young man snorts. 

“There you go. Couldn’t possibly say go invest in a bodyguard in Gnomedecan and don’t buy fish today because you’ll puke for a week.”

“No,” says Luke. “That would be too simple.” 

The young man cheerfully stands him his next drink and the conversation turns, or maybe turns back, to Scored love. The young man talks derisively, but seems to look forward to meeting his. He presses Luke half-jokingly for details, and Luke waves his hand.

“Even if I was a proper Scorer, I’d need to know your name first,” he points out.

“Badaq Oakland,” says the young man instantly, without any bother, as if he hadn’t just introduced himself as a God General and the father of the next queen of Kimlasca. Luke somehow manages to keep a game face. 

“I’m Luke Grants,” he replies, more easily than last time. Largo– Badaq– takes that at face value too, and he’s so young at twenty-something and his eyes are still bright. “Badaq Oakland, you said? That girl you’re Scored to marry… Isn’t–“ Isn’t she going to die betrayed? Isn’t she going to kill herself? Isn’t she your doom, your destiny, your entire Score and the rebellion against it? “Isn’t her name Sylvia?” The young man blinks at him.

“I don’t know anyone named Sylvia,” he says. “But isn’t that a Kimlascan name?”

“Probably,” says Luke. “I know she’s–“ doomed, lost, forsaken “–beautiful. Just like your daughter.” Badaq Oakland grins from ear to ear. 

“She’s gotta be,” he says. “They’re both going to be the most beautiful people in the world.”

————

Nephry is going to school in Grand Chokmah now. Brigadier Curtiss worked something out for her that wasn’t military school. Jade is excelling at the military academy and also terrifying people left and right. Saphir wants a flightstone, much to everyone’s amusement especially Luke’s. Keterberg is quiet. Gelda Nebilim has another set of students to impart her wisdom to. All is well.

Luke accompanies Badaq Oakland to Kimlasca, to Baticul, and talks trade with a young, very young Sergeant Cecille. She’s ambitious and cool-headed and she worries for her cousin on Hod. 

“At this point, I’d rather bargain with Malkuth than fight them,” she says. “But it’s not my call.” Across the marketplace, Badaq Oakland crosses paths with a girl who looks like Natalia only without the ice-sharp royalty to her. She has a sweet smile, and the man who isn’t Largo yet speaks to her gently.

“War wouldn’t benefit anyone,” Luke says. Sergeant Cecille hums low in her throat.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Duke Fabre says we’d benefit from more territory.” She doesn’t sound convinced, and Luke has to wonder what will happen in the twenty-five years to come that will make her so loyal to his father. 

————

It’s Sergeant Cecille who lets Luke – lets Cantor Grants – slip into the lives of Kimlasca’s elite. King Ingobert, twenty-five years younger, doesn’t wear a mustache, and the Queen is beautiful in a Malkuth sort of way. They sit without their arms touching, without any affection between them. There is a glimmer of something like affection, oddly enough, between the Queen and Duchess Suzanne fon Fabre, who have tea together and talk about Scored engagements and the future. 

“Do you believe in the Score?” Luke asks, and he means to be asking if they believe in the Score-as-absolute. The Queen tilts her head. She is young too, Sergeant Cecille’s age or younger, younger than dainty little bird-boned Suzanne. 

“I am from Malkuth,” she says with a bitter sort of pride. “I believe in politics.” 

“Don’t be unkind,” says Suzanne. “Of course we believe. Everyone does.”

————

It will be six years until Natalia is born, and then another three until the fall of Hod. He has time. Jade has made a new friend at the academy, a boy called Jasper. They’re friends because they keep getting each others mail by mistake and Jade threatened to burn down the post office. Jasper seems a but star-struck. Nephry is doing well, and seems to be hurtling towards a career in diplomacy. She mails Luke copies of her report cards. Saphir is outright banned from several parts of Fon Machine Lab One and swears eternal and misspelled vengeance. 

“I was expecting disaster,” Professor Nebilim writes, “even with everything you said. I’m glad that so far, I have been wrong. Stay safe out there, and keep in touch.” Someone has scribbled over a third of her letter in very pink crayon.

Luke wanders the streets of his home city like a stranger. Baticul as Baticul has never really felt like home. Fabre manor doesn’t feel like home anymore, either, and Suzanne is much to young to be anyone’s mother. Duke Fabre is young and vicious rather than old and vicious but he still spits fire and talks of war and conquest. The only time Luke sees him, the man is raging at Sergeant Cecille for fraternizing with the enemy. 

“My cousin is there, on Hod,” says Sergeant Cecille coldly, staring her employer in the eye. “She is my kin. What would you do for your family, my lord?” Not, seethes Duke Fabre, commit treason. Sergeant Cecille turns on her heel and walks out. 

————

It will be four years until Natalia is born. Badaq Oakland is planning his wedding in between bodyguard jobs and bounty hunts. Luke has somehow managed to convince everyone he meets he belongs to the Order, despite having no paperwork and no love for the Score. Far away in Grand Chokmah, Peony worries about war and politics and what sort of empire he will inherit. Nephry buries herself in books on history and political discourse and trade deals and writes to Luke complaining about how illogical people seem to be. She’s so young, though, too young to be saying things like that. They’re both too young. Twelve and ten are too young for a lot of things. Anise had been twelve, and far, far too young. Saphir gets into fights with Class I and swears he’s going to build a flightstone himself. 

“It’s just a machine,” he writes. “People think it’s magical because they don’t understand how it works, but in the Dawn Age people understood and could make them, so there’s no reason we can’t make them now except that people now are stupid and would rather lie to themselves then discover things. I’ll SHOW them.” Luke wishes him luck, and wonders, not for the first time, how Dist actually managed to cross an ocean in an armchair. There’s something to it. It’s a better thing for him to focus on, anyway. 

Jade sends a one sentence letter that makes Luke’s blood run cold. It’s unsigned and clearly sent in a hurry, scribbled on a piece of paper with a letterhead torn off neatly. 

“Do you think human fomicry is feasible?”

“As a representative of the Order of Lorelei,” Luke writes back, “I have to ask if you think you can replicate a soul, or just a body.” It’s not an answer, but he knows that Jade already knows the answer. Or if he doesn’t, he will soon. 

“I don’t believe in souls. They aren’t quantifiable. That does make it difficult to replicate them, even in theory. Does that make the act”– impossible is written, then crossed out – “not feasible?”

“Yes.” Luke considers underlining that word a few times for emphasis, but decides against it. “Until such a thing can be quantified, human fomicry isn’t feasible. Have you asked Professor Nebilim?”

“Professor says it is immoral,” is the only response Luke gets to that, and he really hopes the matter is closed. He’s also fairly certain Tamara is screening Saphir’s correspondence, so the matter should be closed in that direction too. Probably. Jade is young enough to take instructions, he thinks. That’s the benefit of them being so young. 

It doesn’t cross Luke’s mind that he’s thinking along similar lines to someone else, looking down at children of value and thinking about how to make them do what he wanted, how to use them to save the world, not just then.

————

It crosses his mind several days later and in a thoroughly different context, after a man in a Scorer’s clothes and a thick hood sits down across from him in a Chesedonian cafe. Luke smiles politely at the stranger. 

“Hello,” he says. “May I help you?” The stranger gives an awkward little laugh.

“Well, probably,” he admits. “But I also think I can help you. That’s diplomacy, isn’t it?” Something in the stranger’s manner of speaking is terribly familiar, but Luke can’t place it. 

“Probably,” Luke hedges. The stranger nods. 

“Alright, then let’s be honest, please.” The stranger drops his hood, revealing a young, pale face and deep green eyes. Luke’s first, stupid thought is that he’s talking to Ion, his Ion, but no, there’s a gulf of decades. The stranger blinks at him and smiles wanly. “My name is Evanos. You’ve been telling everyone you work for me.”

“Oh,” says Luke. Not Ion. Ion’s father, Ion’s predecessor, the present Fon Master. This is going to give him even more of a headache than Largo or Dist ever could, he can just tell. “Your Holiness.”

“There’s no need for that, Sir Luke,” Evanos says placidly. “I’m traveling incognito.” The weak smile twists somewhat. “The Maestros would have my neck if they knew, you see.”

“My apologies?” Luke offers uncertainly. “And you oughtn’t call me sir. I’m just–“ a replica “– and impostor, after all.” Evanos shakes his head.

“That’s why I’m here,” he says. “That is, I don’t want you to be an impostor. You seem to be doing a lot of good, an you certainly are not acting outside the Order of Lorelei’s mission. Legitimizing your position is simply a matter of paperwork.”

“Would it be fair to your Oracle Knights?” Luke asks. Evanos stares at his hands. 

“It would not be without precedence to give an outsider rank in such a way. A number of my predecessors…” He falters, tries again. “In times of war, I suppose…” He shakes his head. “You’ve done your research, so you probably know I could make you a God General– it’s been done before, and no one is allowed to question it.” Luke gapes. Evans smiles weakly at his hands. “I do technically run the Order. People forget that sometimes.”

Evanos is a lot like Ion in that they both also don’t really take no for an answer, not when they’ve set their minds to something.

————

He’s invited to the wedding. Badaq Oakland thinks it’s funny to have a big shot from the Order for a sort-of-friend. It will be three years until Natalia is born. 

“What does a God General even do?” he asks. Luke shrugs, and doesn’t say: they destroy worlds. He doesn’t say: you’d know, you’ll know. He doesn’t say: they tell lies. 

“Things,” he says. “Generally.” Sylvia Oakland rolls her eyes. 

“It’s probably classified, isn’t it?” she asks, as she pulls her new husband away. 

“Probably,” says Luke. “Sorry.” 

She doesn’t have Natalia’s ice cold royalty, but she does have a spark of needle-sharpness in her eyes that Luke never expected. That’s the problem, when you only know people by their deaths. He’d never know Sylvia Oakland was clever and sharp and he’d never know Gelda Nebilim liked to color-code her notes and he’d never know his aunt the Queen cared more for her countries than for the Score. There are a lot of things he wouldn’t have ever known.

————

Saphir makes twenty seven semi-functional prototype flight stones in the next three years. Jade plunges into increasingly esoteric and classified experiments in resonance, but doesn’t speak of human fomicry again. Nephry takes to the stage to overcome her nerves and learns to shut down imperial advisors. Peony learns swordsmanship and writes to Luke about his dreams of running away. Professor Nebilim takes on an assistant teacher, a young man with few ambitions and a head for numbers named Peri Osbourne. Nephry and her Scored husband are on opposite sides of an empire. Luke drifts through borders with a God General’s ease. In Daath, he bickers with an ambitious, somewhat newly-minted Maestro Mohs, who thinks God Generals are for wartime only. 

“Doesn’t the Score predict another war?” Luke snaps. Mohs narrows his already narrow eyes. 

“Then you ought to wait for it, as we all do!” he shoots back. He looks like he wants to say something else, but Maestro Tritheim intervenes and drags him off. Evanos is watching them from a high window, and he looks very much afraid. 

———— 

Sylvia Oakland and her husband are happy together. Luke isn’t going to let either of them die. That’s why he talks his way into the Queen’s rooms one day, waving his credentials and talking like Van used to, like Van hopefully won’t ever. The Queen is pregnant, and she looks like death. Suzanne is sitting by her bedside, and she stands when Luke walks in. 

“Cantor Grants? What are you doing here?” she asks. Luke bows, trying to hide that he’s gotten this far without anything akin to a full plan. What’s there to say?

“Do you believe in the Score?” he asks. The Queen raises her head from her pillows to look at him, and a grimace of agony crosses her face. 

“No,” she says between gritted teeth. “No I do not.”

“Cantor Grants, please,” says Suzanne. “Is this really the time?”

“Yes, it is,” says Luke, rather more firmly. “Because the Score has declared that your daughter will die, and I need you to disbelieve that with all your heart.” Suzanne gasps and balls her fists, but the Queen looks steadily at him for a long moment.

“And that is why they would not tell me Natalia’s Score,” she says finally. “At least you’re honest. What do you advise I do?”

————

Sylvia Oakland’s daughter is born mere days before the princess in the castle. Luke sends flowers and congratulations. The Queen’s daughter is born sickly and weak, but she lives and she thrives. The Queen has a mother’s intuition as well as a politician’s, and she quickly finds and installs Sylvia Oakland, her mother, and her infant daughter in the rooms reserved for her personal servants. 

It’s unfair, really, that Meryl Oakland won’t grow up with a crown on her head, a bow in her hand, and and a kingdom at her feet, the way she’s probably supposed to, but she will grow up in the palace, hand in hand with a little dark-haired girl who lives outside the Score. She will grow up with a handmaid for a mother and a royal guard for a father, and she’ll live, maybe, in peace. 

“A friend of mine had a baby,” Luke writes to Professor Nebilim. “I don’t really know what to do or say, but it’s really a wonderful thing. They – all three of them – will be so happy. They're so young.”

And now he has to worry about Hod. Only Hod.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did say there was going to be more of this, yeah? This chapter is the calm before the storm, because Hod is up next and Hod isn't ever not a disaster. Yaaaay!


	4. Hod

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter took so long. It's uh... long. Also Hod is a disaster. But! I got a super cute and wonderful art (of Luke and Evanos!) from the lovely curefl0ra/songbirdsonata: http://curefl0ra.tumblr.com/post/148080212083/whispers-23murasaki-its-a-quick-doodle-but-here
> 
> <3 <3

He misses Asch’s– the real Luke’s– birth because he goes to Hod early. They let him cross the border and the ocean without batting an eye– what’s one God General more or less, in this world? It’s not like anyone is afraid of them, of Cantor Grants.

Hod and Feres are beautiful places, and Luke could be content to drift aimlessly through them taking in the sights. He can’t do that, though, not without seeing military garrisons and guards and navy ships and a girl who looks like Sergeant Cecille – like Guy – like a replica he remembers from the Tower of Rem. She’s fourteen and fearless.

“People said you’re a God General,” she says abruptly, coming up to him on the street. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” Luke confirms, eying her. She folds her arms like Guy used to and frowns. 

“Does that mean Daath is expecting another war?”

“I’m not here to start a war, Miss Gardios,” says Luke, and the girl’s eyes go wide for a moment. “That is your name, isn’t it? Mary Gardios?”

“That’s right,” she says. “Did someone blow my cover? I know I’m supposed to be watching my brother…” Luke can’t help but laugh at the way she says that. 

“It’s not that,” he promises. “It’s just, the ladies in your family all look rather alike, and I was just in Baticul…”

“Oh,” she says, perking up. “You know Jozette, then? She’s my cousin, and she’s lovely even though she’s Kimlascan.” She’s willing to chat on the topic for about half an hour. Luke repeats his usual lie that he’s from Kaitzur, when asked, and the Guy’s sister proves to be remarkably knowledgable about vacation spots too. 

————

Over the next year, the military presence only increases. It’s worrying. Kimlascan ships do drills in the bay, and Malkuth soldiers knock on doors and hole themselves up in a base that’s so well-guarded not even the God General Luke Grants can be let in. They’re apologetic, but firm. He hasn’t the paperwork. 

Jade doesn’t write back. Eventually he sends a two line letter informing Luke that everything he could talk about would be redacted by the military police anyway, so this is just saving everyone the trouble. Nephry expects war and Scored disaster. Saphir, on advice from Professor Nebilim, turns down around five different contracts that would have him designing weapons for Malkuth or Kimlasca. Peony’s father grows ill, and the prince takes on almost all his duties. He doesn’t want war, he hates the very thought of it, and he hopes that Count Gardios agrees with him. 

Count Gardios is tall and thin and looks very little like his son. Pacing up and down the room with his hands behind his back, he looks rather like what Duke Fabre would look his had he been born in Malkuth rather than Kimlasca. He talks like Duke Fabre too, and his wife sweeps Mary and Guy behind her every time he starts to yell. 

Lord and Lady Fabre talk about the Score in absolutes and about Yulia Jue as if they know her. They don’t talk about their son. Luke catches a glimpse of the boy, once, in a window, and thinks that at that age Van looks a lot like his sister will. He’s tall for his age, but that doesn’t make him older. He’s so young. It’s unfair that they’re always so young when these things happen. 

“Doesn’t Lady Fende have a son?” he asks Mary one day. She nods distractedly as she passes Guy a model fon machine. 

“Vandesdelca, wasn’t it?” she says. “Van. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“I like Van,” Guy supplies. He’s not even five yet. He likes everything that isn’t loud and climbs onto his sister’s lap when he’s scared. He’s so little, so young, so fragile still– this is the child that Pere took from the ruins of Hod and fled with, this is the child that swore eternal revenge on the Fabre family, but he’s so young that he’s shorter than the Jewel of Gardios, when the two of them are set side-by-side. 

“I know you did,” says Mary, patting her brother on the head. “ But I don’t think he’s going to come back,” she adds more quietly, once Guy is engrossed in his toys once again. She says that matter-of-factly and her face betrays no emotion. Van obviously isn’t missed, not by anyone except Guy. 

At least Luke knows the exact day Hod is supposed to fall. That makes it marginally easier. 

————

There’s time to spare, months to spare, when he’s called back to Daath for a few days. Evanos thinks Mohs is plotting a coup, which he probably is, and Mohs is telling everyone that Evanos has gone off his rocker and is lying about the Score, which he possibly is, but there isn’t any proof one way or another. Evanos’s thin fingers pluck at his robes and pull out all the stitches in the hems and embroidery. 

“Something awful is coming,” he says to Luke. “I can feel it. Can you feel it?”

“Just because it’s coming doesn’t mean it will arrive,” Luke says soothingly. “That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?” Evanos turns to him with a helpless gesture that sends a tassel tumbling from his robes. 

“Is it? Are you?” he asks. “I know I brought you here, but I don’t know who you are– what you are.” It would have sounded accusatory if it hadn’t sounded so despairing. “What have I done?” Luke frowns and forcibly sits the man down in a chair. 

“What happened?” he asks. Evanos hangs his head and doesn’t meet Luke’s gaze. 

“I was reading from the Sixth Fonstone,” he says softly. “About Hod,and the Destroyer– that was what I was trying to read– but there was a crack in the Fonstone, you see, just above it, and another above that, and I hadn’t looked before but they’re everywhere you were and they blot out the Score as it is written there.” He pauses. “And when I summoned you, you were on Hod. Why?” 

“N.D. 2002,” Luke recites. “The One Who Will Seize Glory shall destroy the land upon which he was born, a land known as Hod. War shall thereafter persist between Kimlasca and Malkuth for a full cycle of the seasons.” Evanos stares at him. “So begins the Score of the Final Judgement, doesn’t it?”

“You aren’t supposed to know that,” he says. “I did not give you clearance to know that. Who told you?” 

“No one told me,” says Luke, and it’s not entirely a lie. He’s heard it dozens of times already, that part of the Score, but not out loud before in this lifetime. “No one told me,” Luke repeats. “No one betrayed you. Even I haven’t betrayed you, look–“ He tries to take Evanos by the shaking shoulders, but the man shoves him away roughly. 

“Why should I believe that?” he snaps. 

“Because,” Luke says, fighting to keep his voice calm, “I am trying to save people’s lives. Listen to me. If The One Who Will Seize Glory destroys Hod, he will kill thousands of innocents now and then millions more when he is grown, and he will force the Score of Final Judgement into being by working against it. You may belong to the Order, but you’re a good man. Surely you don’t want all of the world to die?”

“… When he is grown?” Evanos asks, still shrinking away from him. “The Destroyer is a child?”

“Yes,” Luke says, and he doesn’t say: don’t you see, they’re all children. He doesn’t say: that’s what it takes to make you question blowing up an island full of people? He doesn’t say: everyone was a child once. “He is a child and they are keeping him locked away to fulfill the Score.” And he doesn’t say: they did that to me too, you see, and it hurts, it still hurts after all these years. Evanos unfolds a little, and his wary green eyes narrow. 

“It doesn’t say that,” he murmurs. “I know the Score– the Order has people on Hod…” He pauses. “What do you mean to do?”

“He can’t destroy Hod if he isn’t on Hod,” Luke says. “It’s a matter of resonance. I’m going to take him off of the island. No one will miss him.” Not if they think he’s dead. 

“Simple,” says Evanos. 

“Simple works best,” says Luke. “The more steps something has the more likely it is that it’s Scored, but one or two discordant notes aren’t noticed.” One or two replicas. One or two descendants of Yulia. One tragic accident, one theory, one child who died and one that lived– what’s a change like that to something as massive as the Score?

“And the war?” Evanos asks. 

“Malkuth doesn’t want war,” says Luke slowly. “And King Ingobert…” He doesn’t say: King Ingobert is a weak-willed fool who would turn on his own daughter if someone told him to. He doesn’t say: King Ingobert is my uncle, was my uncle. He doesn’t say: King Ingobert is, at heart, a decent man. “King Ingobert can be convinced, I’m sure of it.”

————

Luke returns to Hod two days after that, passing through a Kimlascan naval blockade, only to be met in the port by a frantic Mary Gardios, dragging Guy by the wrist. Guy looks like he’s been crying, and he’s clutching a doll dressed like an Oracle Knight. 

“You!” she shouts when she sees Luke, then promptly grabs him and hauls him somewhere rather more secluded. 

“What’s happened?” he asks, because it’s doubtful she’d freak out that much over the blockade. 

“You were asking about Vandesdelca– the only one asking about Vandesdelca,” she accuses. “And then he– he was here!”

“What?” The girl takes a deep breath. 

“I thought– I heard Lord and Lady Fende had him sent away– he was sick– some people said he died– only he broke into Father’s– He was in the courtyard, Guy saw him – he was asking for help and then the soldiers came and they took him away but they didn’t take him to his parents’ house, they took him to the base and there’s a young Major in charge there now because they sent half the soldiers away and brought in new ones and he gives me the creeps and Lord Fende was pretending none of it happened and I’m not allowed to talk to Lady Fende because she’s pregnant and we’re not supposed to upset her!” Mary says all of that in one breath, and Guy starts sobbing again somewhere in the middle of her speech. It takes a moment to sink in. 

“The Malkuth army took Vandesdelca?” he summarizes. Mary nods. “When?” He’s reasonably sure he can talk his way into House Fende, but military security tended to be tighter. This isn’t good.

“Two days ago,” says the girl. “In the evening. It was getting dark. I was going to go fetch Guy indoors when…” She pauses, shakes her head. “You had something to do with this. I know you did. They don’t have God Generals unless there’s a war going on.” 

“How could I have had something to do with this?” Luke snaps. “I haven’t been here in weeks! I don’t even know who’s running the base now– are you sure it’s someone new?” Both she and Guy nod vehemently. Apparently the young Major has made an unfavorable impression. 

“Creepy eyes,” Guy whimpers. 

“Creepy everything,” says Mary. “I… One of the soldiers said the Major had hurried up work on Project Glory, and I don’t know what that is, but…but in Ancient Ispanian…”

“Van-Tarel,” Luke translates. Somewhere along lifetimes he’s gotten really good at Ancient Ispanian. His past self would absolutely laugh at him for it. “I see the cause for concern.” More cause for concern than Mary could ever know. 

“That’s why the Order of Lorelei has to be in on it, you see,” says Mary. “Malkuth doesn’t care a whit for ancient languages. They wouldn’t call it that.” 

“Well, whatever it is doesn’t have the Fon Master’s blessing, I can tell you that much,” says Luke. “Or mine. I’ll deal with it. You two stay out of trouble.”

Theres’s still time, of course, there’s still time, but every step Luke takes makes him feel like the ground is about to collapse beneath him. He’s gotten so far. He doesn’t want– he can’t fail now, he can’t. By the time he reaches the base he feels almost like he’s in Keterberg again, like he’s smelling smoke and blood on snow and disaster. 

The guards he can see are young, too young for this. They’re barely teenagers. One of them is Mary’s age. They’re too young to be soldiers and too young to marry Kings and too young to be raising little brothers, all of them. One demands identification, voice pitched falsely low in a way that reminds Luke of Sync, and he shoves all his papers at the boy. 

“A God General?” The fake-deep voice cracks. “Who sent you?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Luke says. “I need to talk to whoever’s in charge here.”

“I… don’t think that’s a good idea,” says a slightly older guard apprehensively. “The Major’s not someone you… um…” She seems unsure of how to phrase her point. Luke frowns. 

“I really don’t care if the Major is a two-headed rappig,” he says. “Either take me to see him or bring him to me.” Neither one of those things has to be done, though, because a young man in an impeccable uniform steps into view, sets eyes on Luke, and interrupts loudly.

“Cantor Grants, how nice of you to join us. You should have told me you were coming and we could have avoided all this hassle.” It takes Luke a solid ten seconds to recognize Jade, maybe because he's gotten relatively used to the mental image of Jade Balfour, age ten, and now he is faced with Jade Curtiss, age twenty, who looks absolutely like the sort of man to run away from very fast but also has a silver ribbon braided into his hair. The guards stand down at the sight of him, and Luke offers a thin smile.

"I would have," he says, "if anyone had cared to inform me that you were transferred here. Or is that classified as well?” Jade frowns.

“Well, to an extent,” he admits. “Please come in– I can give you something of a tour before I have to go pick Saphir up.” Luke expression is probably communicating his thoughts quite clearly, because Jade’s frown deepens. “What? I am permitted to import anything I deem necessary.”

“Does Project Glory have a carte blanche or do you?” Luke asks. Jade turns away.

“That’s classified. Come to my office, and I will be able to talk freely.”

————

It’s Project Glory, the highly secretive study of hyperresonance, that has carte blanche. Jade is the new head of it, by virtue of having gotten the previous head of it fired for professional misconduct. 

“With my background in fomicry, I was the obvious choice,” says Jade. “Though usurpation was not quite my intention.” He adjusts his glasses uncomfortably, and Luke catches a glimpse of red eyes, of fonic sight. 

“What was your intention?” Luke asks. 

“… Stopping the project,” Jade says. “They were… they still are seeking to use fomicry to further their work. In theory, the creation of artificial isofons and, by extension, artificial hyperresonances, could benefit the military and industry– transportation and farming even– but some of the work being done was… purely for the purpose of creating weapons and killing people. That is not what we are supposed to be working on. Professor Nebilim personally went over the preliminary prospectus for Project Glory, and there was a committee on ethics.” His eyebrows draw together on his forehead and for a split second he looks very much a child again. “They lied, you see,” he adds. 

“That’s a nice speech,” says Luke. “You still had a twelve-year-old kidnapped.” Jade shrugs dramatically, a very familiar gesture. “Don’t you shrug at me.” 

“He’s safer here than where his father can get at him,” says Jade flatly. “Or the Kimlascans. Or Daath.” A beat. “No offense meant, of course, but someone in Daath is anonymously funding us. Did you know that?” It’s probably Mohs. It’s been Mohs every time it wasn’t Van, after all. 

“I even probably know who,” says Luke. “That isn’t the point. Kidnapping is both illegal and immoral. What do you mean to do with the boy?”

“I mean to keep him here, run some tests, fudge the results, and then put him somewhere else while I dismantle Project Glory. What’s your idea?” Honesty is probably the best policy with Jade under any circumstance. 

“I need to get him off of this island before he causes a hyperresonance and collapses it into the miasma,” Luke says. “The longer he stays here the more dangerous the situation becomes.”

“I see,” says Jade, and a very Jade grin spreads across his face. “So you mean to kidnap him as well. Very well, then. Only we will all be suspected if the boy disappears from a locked facility.” His grin stays in place, but he leans forward to look Luke in the eyes. “Conveniently, most of Project Glory’s top secret work and data have been collected here, as well as a number of other documents. Were something to happen to the facility itself, we would not be expected to go back for test subjects.” Luke nods.

“Kidnapping, not murder, Jade,” he says, and then a clock strikes the hour. Jade ignores him and makes for the door.

“I have to go pick Saphir up now. I doubt he can navigate the docks, three roads, and a gate on his own after all. I’ll escort you out.”

————

Saphir Gneiss, age twenty, has a wreath of pink roses on his head as a parting gift from Class M and is excited about everything. He’s also still in a chair, and has apparently attached a prototype fake flightstone or two to it because he zips around well above the ground. For a moment he looks every inch Dist the Reaper, and then he falls out of his chair because he wants to hug Cantor Grants but misjudges the distance. He looks a lot less like Dist when he’s giggling hysterically in Luke’s arms.

“Miss Tamara says I need to put a safety harness on it, but I won’t because they’re ugly. What are you doing here, Cantor Grants?” he asks, once Jade retrieves the runaway chair and Luke sets him securely in it. “Is something bad going to happen like in Keterberg?” 

“Oh yes,” says Jade before Luke can open his mouth. “We’re going to blow up the research facility so that we don’t blow up the entire island. It’ll be lovely fun. Don’t tell Professor.” Saphir stares at him for a solid minute. “What?”

“Jade, um… Jade got tall,” he mutters a bit helplessly. “Jade’s taller than Professor Nebilim now.” This is a completely unnecessary detour in the conversation. 

“Yes, yes,” Jade grumbles. “I’m tall enough to what my head on the Fonbelt, aren’t I?” Saphir hovers closer, wide-eyed and little-kid-curious, then he slumps back and clunks to the floor.

“Not fair. I’m never going to be tall. Who’s blowing up an island?” 

“The One Who Will Seize Glory,” says Luke. Saphir looks progressively more confused. 

“Why?” A beat. “Is it in the Score or something?”

“Or something,” confirms Jade. “And we don’t want that to happen, which is why we need you here. The two of us together can definitely stop it.” Saphir perks up.

“Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so to begin with?” He smiles brightly, and Luke can swear that Dist never smiled that brightly. Jade smiles too, and his eyes gleam behind his glasses. 

————

Everything goes wrong from there. That is, if Jade and Dist tag-teaming destroying the Score with science can be interpreted as something not going wrong. Luke hopes it can. They’re giving him a headache already. Before sunrise the next day, a diplomatic delegation from Malkuth, headed by Crown Prince Peony and staffed by twenty-some-odd liberally minded students including Nephry Curtiss. The whole lot is promptly held hostage. 

“… I have some new prototypes I want to test,” says Saphir. He says it very quietly, but his stare is manic and his fingers twitch on his lap. Jade drops a hand on his shoulder. 

“This first,” he says. “And then we’re going to rip Duke Fabre to pieces.”

“No you aren’t,” Luke says quickly. “No murder.”

————

The plan, like all good plans, is simple. Simple things slip through the Score. Saphir is parked deep within the base, supposedly to monitor fluctuations in the sephiroth tree beneath them and double-check the security system. He has a very specific script to follow. Luke and Jade make the rounds of the base, inspecting all the parts of Project Glory with a wink and a nod and a mention of Scored benefactors. Somehow none of this is questioned by anyone. The Daathic symbols on Luke’s armor, coupled with references to what he claims the Score to be make his words seem unimpeachably true, and on some level he hates it. It’s useful, it’s going to save everyone in this stupid base and on this stupid island, but he hates it.

Jade’s soldiers are all around his age. Jasper Cadogan is the most mature-looking. The youngest is a freshly minted fifteen-year-old lieutenant from Hod who talks with her hands almost as much as Saphir. Her parents are glad she’s stationed near home. Luke hates that too. They’re all children. They’re all so young. 

Jasper almost doesn’t let them out of his sight. It’s like he knows something is wrong. That headache isn’t going away. It’s probably from thinking too much. He hasn’t heard Lorelei speak in lifetimes.

————

Vandesdelca Musto Fende is, at twelve, mostly arms and legs. His eyes are red-rimmed from crying and he’s struggling against both the ropes that bind him and the power limiters that hold his hyperresonance in check. He looks like he hasn’t slept in about a week, and he actually growls at the sight of Luke and Jade. It’s not making Luke’s head feel any better. 

“Don’t be a moron,” says Jade calmly. “Believe it or not, this is for your own good.” Vandesdelca spits at him. “My, my. Aren’t you charming.”

“Shush,” says Luke, because Jade saying words isn’t helping anyone. He crouches down and looks the boy in the face. “Vandesdelca– Van?”

“W-what?” 

“My name is Luke. I’m here to get you out of here. No one wants to destroy Hod, believe me.” It’s abundantly clear that Van does not believe him.

“You’re with the Order of Lorelei,” he mutters, edging away. “You want the Score.” A rather melodic series of beeps sound over the base’s intercom– apparently all is going swimmingly on Saphir’s side. 

“The Score is exactly what I don’t want,” says Luke as patiently as he can. “The Score wants all my friends dead.” In the future, at least. 

“You have two options.” Jade has clearly had enough of hushing. “Either you stay here, let me experiment on you, and let the Score inevitably run its course and kill everyone, or you go with him and have a chance to not kill everyone. It’s quite simple.” 

“Jade,” Luke snaps. Jade rolls his eyes. 

“It was taking too long, sir. When we open this cell, we have two minutes before Saphir cuts the power.” Van looks terrified. He doesn’t look like he can grow up to be Van Grants. Luke offers him an encouraging smile even as the second set of tones plays. No time. Jade unlocks the cell door and throws it open. Van makes a vain attempt to flee, and Luke catches him by the shoulders. 

“Van, listen to me,” he says firmly as he cuts the ropes. “Listen to me. I know what the Score says, but I can fix this. I can fix all of this and get you out of here, do you understand?” He almost says: listen to my voice. He almost says: I can make you a hero. He almost calls the boy in front of him Luke. There’s something in the air that’s making his vision blur and little lights blink in the background of everything, and that’s troublesome. He tightens his grip on Van’s shoulders, and it’s absolutely not to steady himself. “Do you understand?” he repeats. He can’t tell if the boy nods or not, because just then the world goes dark.

“That’s our cue,” says Jade’s voice from somewhere behind them. There is a click and a clink, and then he’s on the intercom. “Saphir, what just happened?”

“I– I absolutely don’t know!” Saphir responds. He almost sounds suitably panicked. “The sephiroth tree is– the fluctuation levels are– Jade, there’s something wrong.” A beat. This is off script. “There’s something actually wrong I think please come get me I can’t get out!” 

“Sir,” Jade says quietly and not into the intercom. “Do you have a contingency plan or are we winging it?” 

“Something’s wrong,” Luke mutters. Everything is still dark, though the little fishing lights are back in force and he can’t tell if the world is spinning or just his head. 

“All units, evacuate the premises,” Jade orders through the intercom. Van makes a break for it again, Luke stumbles and hits the floor with a low groan. The floor feels sideways. 

“Major Curtiss!” The voice on the intercom sounds too young. “Major Curtiss, where are you?”

“Giving our honorable guest a tour,” Jade responds pleasantly before his tone goes cold again. “Evacuate the premises. The God General, Dr. Gneiss, and I will catch up to you momentarily.” Someone kneels down beside Luke.

“Are– aren’t you going after me?” Van asks cautiously. “Mister God General? What is–”

“Help him up,” Jade orders. “If he’s out of commission, then I’m back in charge.” If the floor is sideways, Luke is half-sure his current angle is upside down. Van is almost his height. 

“Major Curtiss, what are you doing?” Van asks. His voice is a little steadier now, but only just. 

“Collecting my engineer, collapsing the building, getting the two of you off this island, and rescuing my sister and His Highness,” says Jade, staccato sharp. “In specifically that order. Move.”

————

The further they go into the bowels of the building, the worse Luke feels. He’s distantly aware that the rest of the soldiers have evacuated. That’s good. No casualties. They’re too young to be casualties. 

“Saphir, what’s your status?” 

“Very lost, actually. But I did like you asked.”

“Good enough. I’ll find you.”

Jade leads them through a spinning maze of hallways, and somewhere along the way a part of Luke’s mind decides, rather independently from the rest of him, that it knows exactly what should be done. He grabs the back of Jade’s uniform.

“The sephiroth tree,” he says. “I know how to make it stop doing that.” It’s not his most coherent moment, and he’s glad to have some degree of control over his hands again because Van tries to drop him as soon as he says sephiroth, but he gets the point across. 

“Saphir, get back to the sephiroth. I’ll find you there.” Van struggles. Jade backhands him across the face. “And you have no place arguing. I don’t think your lot in life can get much worse.”

————

At this point, all Saphir has to do is flip a switch to bring the entire base down around them. He fluctuates between giggling about and and worrying loudly about everything else. He and Van play off of each other awfully, and Luke eventually claps a hand over the kid’s mouth. Van bites him, but he can’t really feel it.

The sephiroth is calling to him, calling with a song that he can feel in his bones. It’s in pain, he thinks, inasmuch as a construct can be. It’s in pain and it knows it is to be cut down. Jade’s voice sounds very far away as he tells Saphir to start the collapse. The sephiroth tree flashes violently, and the ringing in Luke’s ears reaches a fever pitch. Jade turns his back for a moment, just a moment, and Luke–

– child of the covenant, hear my voice – 

– may the will of Lorelei resound –

Luke topples backwards into the sephiroth’s core, dragging Van with him.

————

Was that how it was supposed to go?

————

He needs to get out. Take the boy and get out. Neither one of them can stay, not where it is poisonous. He runs. 

Some amount of time later, Luke collapses face down in the snow, and the feeling is so familiar he wants to scream. He could swear it’s happening all over again, he’s lost them again, but–

“You can’t just– come on, get up– please, Mister God General– Luke!” Van hoists him up into a sitting position, and Luke slumps bonelessly against him. He can’t feel his face. He can barely breathe. At least his headache is fading. “Wake up! Please– I don’t even know where we are!”

“You’re ten minutes outside of Keterberg,” says a very familiar voice. “And your Mister God General has some explaining to do.”

Luke looks up at Professor Nebilim and tries to mouth an apology, then promptly blacks out completely. 

————

He blacks back in in a familiar bed in a room that still smells vaguely of roses. Van is sitting in a plush armchair clutching a cup of something warm, while a young man – possibly Peri Osbourne – interrogates him. Gelda Nebilim is sitting at Luke’s bedside, and she passes him some warm, sweet tea. He takes a sip. 

“Feeling better?” she asks. He nods. “Good. Now.” Her red eyes narrow dangerously, and for the first time Luke really considers the fact that this is the woman Jade based two thirds of his personality on. “You took Saphir to Hod?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See? Disaster. I know I left Jade and Saphir in a collapsing building and Nephry and Peony held hostage by Duke Fabre, but that's to be sorted in the next chapter. There are still THINGS that need to happen!


	5. Keterberg–– and Daath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since Hod was a super long chapter, this one is shorter. Still, it's the end of an era, isn't it?

It’s another day before a very long and panicky letter arrives from Saphir. It’s addressed to Professor Nebilim, but Luke gets his hands on it first while he’s hiding from her wrath. Professor Nebilim smiles with her eyes narrow when she’s angry, and somehow it’s even more terrifying than when Jade used to do it. The letter is slightly incoherent and more than slightly crumpled.

_Professor,_

_I’m really really sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t tell you I was coming here but I have to tell you that I’m here so you have to know that I came here because Jade asked me to and he asked to keep it a secret because he didn’t want to make you angry but I’m not punctuating so I’m going to start now because Hod didn’t blow up so that’s a good thing I think because we’re still alive and so are other people._

_Jade came to Hod because he’s involved in Project Glory and you know about Project Glory even though I don’t very much because Jade says I don’t have top secret keeping ability and then I came to Hod because Project Glory needed an engineer I guess and then Cantor Grants came to Hod because the Score said it was going to blow up and kill everyone, and that’s how we all wound up in the same place, and then Nephry came to Hod because some Kimlascan nobleman wants to invade because I guess he doesn’t know it’s supposed to blow up. That’s the beginning. Peony came too because he’s an idiot._

_It was a bad thing from beginning to end and I wish you had been here because you could fix things but you’re in Keterberg so at least you’re not in danger of blowing up. I thought we had more time than we did, but then Jade kidnapped the Destroyer and then Cantor Grants came and said he had to take the Destroyer away because just because the Score says the Destroyer is the Destroyer doesn’t mean that he needs to destroy anything but he will destroy things if he stays, and the Kimlascan said he was going to parlay with Nephry and Peony but instead he locked them up so we had to put the plan into action early so that we could go and rescue them after. And that wasn’t good because something made Cantor Grants sick when we went into the base._

_Jade says it was miasma, because of his – because of a hypothesis about Cantor Grants’s sonic frequency. It’s a good hypothesis I think but Cantor Grants went into the sephiroth tree so we can’t test it. It will have to remain a hypothesis unless the secondary hypothesis is also true, in which case he can come back because he resonates with Lorelei and Yulia and everything really depends on that and on the echoes, doesn’t it? The Dawn Age always leaves echoes, and I will be able to understand them all eventually, but for now no one does and that’s a problem because I can’t use it to prove that Cantor Grants and the Destroyer are okay._

_The island didn’t blow up, but Cantor Grants went into the sephiroth tree with the Destroyer and Jade made me collapse the base but he evacuated everyone first. He got hit in the head but he said it was more important to go find Nephry and Peony than to go to a healer. I told him he should go to a healer because he was bleeding, but he didn’t listen and he wanted me to fly my chair across the water. I’m not supposed to be able to do that, but I can, because I’ve almost coped a flightstone perfectly. That’s also top secret. The Kimlascan didn’t expect that. He was going to launch an expeditionary force onto the island but a Kimlascan officer lady didn’t want him to. She didn’t do it on purpose but she bought us enough time to come aboard and then Jade challenged him to a duel and the Kimlascan nobleman said Jade should duel the lady officer but the lady officer said that she’d surrender if she had to because her aunt and cousins were on Hod and then the Kimlascan nobleman looked like he wanted to duel with her, but he couldn’t do that because she was his officer. Jade said the Kimlascan nobleman was a coward for hiding behind other people, and after that they had to duel because it was an offense to honor._

_Jade won and also broke the ship, and that’s when they let Nephry and the others go. Nephry said there wouldn’t be a naval blockade anymore, but she was wrong because the Kimlascan nobleman shot at us when we were trying to leave and Nephry got hurt. She said that if she ends up in a chair like mine we can say we’re twins. Jade went back and did something to the Kimlascan nobleman, but he won’t tell me what it is he just said he didn’t kill him because Cantor Grants said no one is supposed to die here. I think he would have killed him otherwise. We were taken to the mainland, and a field marshal that Jade knows says there may be a war unless Daath intercedes. I don’t know if Daath will intercede if Cantor Grants isn’t there. I don’t know what is going to happen. I don’t want a war. I just want something to be proven._

_I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you before. There wasn’t time. I don’t know if there’s time now. Please help._

_Saphir_

Luke hand-delivers it to Professor Nebilim, who smiles coldly at him.

“Reading my mail, Mister God General?” she asks, but then her expression warms. “My, it’s from Saphir.” Then she reads it. Twice. Her face freezes. Everything about her freezes. Her replica had been, would be vicious and monstrously ferocious, but the real Gelda Nebilim burns cold. She folds the letter neatly, tucks it into her pocket, and turns away from him without a word. 

————

It took two healers and the Scion of Lorelei to prevent a Scored death in Keterberg. It takes three times as many people to stop Gelda Nebilim from raining hell and damnation on half the world for putting her children in danger. She only stops and calms once she’s broken poor Peri Osbourne’s nose. Then, she stares wide-eyed at his blood on her hand, mutters an incoherent apology, and locks herself in her house. 

————

She calms enough to agree to keep Van – he’s barely twelve, and needs a teacher much more than he needs the Score or destruction or his distant kin in Yulia City – on as a student. Vandesdelca Musto Fende is reported dead, and Van Grants cuts his hair short and is introduced to his classmates as a transfer student from Kaitzur. Professor Nebilim sets everything in order, nearly buries Peri Osbourne under notes and instructions, and dons the uniform of a Locrian Colonel once again. 

“Daath is hereby intervening?” Luke offers. They look like proper God Generals, both of them. He hates it.

“I’ll burn this world if they do not,” she hisses. “Just you wait and see. They won’t get away with it.” In another lifetime, two of Gelda Nebilim’s students walked away from Keterberg and damned the world in her memory. Jade, Luke thinks, isn’t the only who channeled the dear professor. 

————

A young and angry Maestro Mohs is pretending to mediate between Malkuth and Kimlasca, but he wilts at the sight of Luke and Professor Nebilim. He hasn’t earned his Grand Maestro stripes yet, and he has years to go before his word can feel like law. Duke Fabre seethes safely out of arte range with a bandage over his eyes. Count Gardios looks like a hunting monster, baying for blood. Jade is in chains. Peony looks like he’s been crying. It’s almost a disaster. Almost, because no one is dead. 

“Fabre should hang!” Count Gardios snarls. Neither of his children take after him. “This was a breach of the treaty– you, soldier!” That’s addressed at Jade. “Why didn’t you kill him?”

“I had my orders,” says Jade calmly. “Professor. I’m afraid this is not quite what the two of you would have wanted.”

“We aren’t dead,” says Luke. “It’s something.”

“Someone will be if this isn’t over soon,” says Professor Nebilim. None present doubt her.

————

They do end up taking the matter to Evanos. He draws up another treaty and a nonaggression pact and makes all parties involved sign it. 

“They blinded my brother-in-law!” King Ingobert complains. Duke Fabre has to sign documents by way of an assistant. His sight may not recover, but Luke is sure his pride will.

“He shot at my sister,” Jade replies. Nephry is recovering well, and is watching the proceedings with academic interest. 

“Please,” says Evanos. “I won’t allow this to continue.” He is pale and wan and dying slowly, and Luke wants desperately to save him because he wants desperately to save his Ion, the one he’ll never know again, the one who can’t be created in this world, the one Evanos seems an echo of. 

They all sign, eventually. 

————

Saphir is banned from leaving Belkend, except in the company of Professor Nebilim. That’s alright, though. He seems downright eager to go back. Jade gets a slap on the wrist from Daath, a boost to his reputation, and a medal from his soldiers. Nephry gets enough vacation to go back to Keterberg for a few days, where she’s sure to cross paths with Peri Osbourne.

Luke gets called back to Daath. 

————

Lady Fende gives birth to her daughter in her family home, in a rainstorm. Mystearica Aura Fende won’t ever know she has a brother. Her brother would love her, but it’s better this way. She’ll grow up with parents and soft toys and hymns, and no one will try to make a soldier out of her. 

Suzanne Fon Fabre welcomes her husband home with open arms and says she’s just glad he is alive. For the first time in a long time, he listens. It’s better that way. Suzanne Fon Fabre is smarter than people give her credit for, sometimes, and her son Luke will grow on the knees of politicians, not military leaders. 

It will be seventeen years until the Scored end of the world.


	6. Daath

Luke really should know better, but he’s an idealist at heart and almost expects seventeen years of peace and quiet. Almost. He gets six months of peace and quiet, which he spends tracking down every doctor on Auldrant who could possibly save Evanos. There are years to go before the man’s Scored death, but Luke doesn’t want to take chances. The doctors can’t agree on anything except that it’s hereditary, that whatever is killing him will probably kill his descendants too and probably killed a handful of his predecessors. Evanos takes it with more calm than he took any revelation about Luke.

“The bloodline,” he says. “They do say that power comes with sacrifice.” He frowns, and when he speaks again it is in a much flatter, more matter-of-fact tone. “I know that I will die young, but… I am Scored to have a son. Ion.” Luke’s heart hurts. “I do not wish to poison my child from birth.” That’s Scored too, though, Luke thinks. Both boys called Ion die too young. Evanos must read it on his face, because he sighs and looks down. “I see. I rather prefer when others do not suffer for the sins of the past.”

“My apologies, Fon Master,” says one of the doctors, the one who is least afraid to speak freely in front of a God General. She has frown lines on her face and the thin, fair hair that’s so common in families that had once come from old Keter, but she herself hails from Southern Rugnica. “I can only… If Your Holiness were anyone else, I would suggest… I would suggest the bloodline terminate there.” She doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes when she says that, because she’s too busy watching Luke’s sword. Luke puts his hands in his pockets instead and doesn’t notice that he’s standing like Jade once did. 

“I understand,” says Evanos. “Thank you for your advice. I appreciate honesty.” 

————

Evanos will have to name a new Grand Maestro, before he dies. He’s been putting that off, trying to run Daath by way of the Consortium and his God General. If he were to live, he could probably carry on like that indefinitely, but someone will have to play regent to Ion. Half the Consortium of Maestros backs Mohs, because he’s clever and competent. Luke recommends Tritheim, who lacks both cleverness and ambition.

“Tritheim?” Evanos asks dubiously. “He is a good man, to be sure, but a Grand Maestro must be able to play politics.” He grimaces as he says that. 

“Do you trust Mohs?” Luke asks. Evanos grimaces harder. “Well, I don’t either.”

“Do you think Tritheim can lead?” Evanos asks. It’s Luke’s turn to grimace. He has a distant memory of Tritheim as Grand Maestro in some slightly ridiculous future, a Grand Maestro who pleaded for peace even as the Malkuth army marched into Baticul itself. 

“The Fon Master is the head of the Order,” Luke non-answers. “A Grand Maestro is only meant to be a second.”

————

After another half a year of scheming and backstabbing among the Maestros, border skirmishes between Kimslasca and Malkuth, and an ever-growing conspiracy theory about the Planet Score that is so wrong Luke can’t help but encourage it, Evanos names Tritheim Grand Maestro. Everyone is baffled. A lot of people see Luke’s hand in it. Tritheim tries to refuse the position, explaining that his duty to Lorelei and Yulia is one of service, not of command.

“The Fon Master and the Grand Maestro are merely head servants,” says Evanos, who is near-bedridden at that point. “I need someone who can understand that. Few people seem to, nowadays.”

Mohs corners Luke after the ceremony and draws himself up to his full height. It isn’t an impressive height, but Fabre men tend to be short, and Luke is smaller than his father, even. Mohs fails to loom, but succeeds at looking down. 

“You had something to do with this, I know it,” Mohs hisses. “With this– this blasphemy! I am Scored to attain glory and high standing!” Luke has gotten quite good at his game face over the years. He stares Mohs down without batting an eye.

“If it’s in the Score, I’m sure it will come true, Maestro,” Luke says flatly. “There is nothing anyone can do to change the Score, after all.” Mohs looks like he wants to punch him, but doesn’t move. He’s probably too much of a coward to do something like that. There’s rumor drifting through the Consortium, Luke knows, about cracks in the Fonstones and deviations from the Score, but no one is willing to call it anything but a silly rumor. Calling it anything else would be giving it power. 

“I’ll be watching you,” Mohs says finally, then turns on his heel and stalks off. 

————

Ion’s mother, hardly more than a child herself, is seven months pregnant and has stopped eating and sleeping. Evanos is almost at that point himself. Their stares are vacant most of the time, and they waste away in their beds. 

“It’s ending, isn’t it?” the girl says. She doesn’t address Luke, gazing instead at something far past him and over his head. “It has to end. We’re all dying.”

“I’m sorry,” Luke says, because there’s nothing he can do. Healing them only makes it worse. Lorelei’s resonance makes them sicker. He smooths green-gold hair back from her forehead, and tries not to think about how young she is. She doesn’t even have a Fon Master’s power, just Daath’s own cursed blood that is killing her as if she has miasma in her veins. She looks at him, just then, and there’s a spark of recognition in her eyes.

“You’ll end it, won’t you?” she asks, and smiles weakly. It’s the last thing she says.

————

She’s Evanos’s cousin, Luke learns, the day before she dies giving birth. There is genuine fear in the midwife’s voice when she says the lady died laughing, laughing because she’d given birth to twins. It’s her first and last moment of defiance. 

Evanos lives another three days. He holds his identical, green eyed sons in his arms only once, and in a feverish haze calls both of them Ion. It’s something like a prophecy. 

————

Daath is, then, left without real leadership. Tritheim is a good man, and he does his best to serve his people, but he is gentle and faithful and steady and nothing else except maybe well-liked. Mohs plots and schemes and travels to Kimlasca, but Duke Fabre cannot lead an army anymore and Mohs hasn’t the benefit of high station, so their schemes remain just that. 

Luke finds himself in command of the Oracle Knights, by virtue of no one really trusting Tritheim with military matters. It’s not anyone’s fault. Professor Nebilim sends Luke notes about whom best to promote.

When the emperor of Malkuth dies, people hardly notice. Peony has been running the country for years now. He comes to Daath after he’s crowned, though, to hear a reading of his country’s future. 

“You aren’t bound by it,” Luke says. He doesn’t say: you’re Scored to die murdered. He doesn’t say: you’re Scored to die alone. He doesn’t say: there’s something in the water in Keterberg because none of you die when you’re killed. 

“You’d know, wouldn’t you?” Peony replies. At Luke’s baffled stare, he smiles rather sadly. “Jade had a clever idea, you see, about what can exist in the Planet Storm. You’re not a real person, are you, Cantor Grants?”

“You can punch me,” says Luke. “I’m real enough.” It’s not enough. 

“Why are you doing this?” Peony asks. “Why are you changing our fates?”

“The Score as it is written becomes discordant,” Luke says. “Lorelei… Lorelei is a being of harmony.” Peony nods, grins, stretches. 

“It’s wrong, too,” he adds carelessly. “Score says Saphir died ages ago. Drowned. That’s why neither him nor Jade really take it seriously.” 

————

A woman from the Isle of Feres arrives on Luke’s doorstep with a small child, some time later. They both have the odd, almost pink hair of Feres nobles, and the woman presses the child into Luke’s arms before he can open his mouth. 

“She should belong to the Order,” the woman says. “Please, take her.”

“Why?” Luke asks, even as he tucks the silent little girl against his shoulder and pats her comfortingly. 

“She talks to monsters, our Arietta,” the woman says. “And they answer.”

It will be fourteen years until the Scored end of the world.


	7. Daath – again

The Oracle Knights take children as recruits, but Arietta is too young even for them. A woman Maestro – one of the number that hadn’t backed Mohs, Luke thinks – takes the girl and leaves her in the keeping of a sect of the Order based out of somewhere in Rugnica. They’re opposed to war on all fronts, she says, and they tend to cheagles and gardens. They’ll keep her safe. 

Arietta won’t be raised by monsters, not in this life, but her gift is hers to use. She’ll be the voice of small things, and much like before she will have brothers and sisters who love her and want to protect her. It’s for the best. She seems happy, when Luke comes to visit her, and she has cheagles climbing all over her. 

Ion – both Ions, now that poses more of a problem, not in the least because no one can confirm which one is the one that’s supposed to be there. They’re twins, yes, but they’re also perfect isofons, and they both watch their minders with clear green eyes that spark with an unnatural intelligence. On paper, one is named Ion and the other is named Freyr, because there is no protocol for naming a spare Fon Master so they named him after the first one. No one knows, not even Luke knows, which one is Ion and which one is Freyr. 

It may be better that way. 

————

With twelve years to go until the Scored end of the world, Luke wakes up exhausted every day and reads letters and reports from around Auldrant. Arietta is growing like a weed, and runs through the Abafand Sect’s gardens barefoot and flanked by dozens of little creatures that move in perfect sync with her. Van practices swordplay in the snow and reads and reads and reads about resonance and fomicry and the creation of artes and tells Professor Nebilim that advances in medicine can change the world for the better, that he wants to be a healer, just like her. Kimlasca’s princess sneaks out of the palace hand in hand with her self-styled protector. Duke Fabre’s son binds his eyes with cloth and stumbles through swordplay katas, but each blind step is steadier than the last. Malkuth flourishes under Peony’s rule, but he rules alone. Nephry travels and writes affectionate letters to Peri Osbourne. Saphir is the pride of Class M, and Jade deals entirely in classified matters. House Gardios and House Fende live on. 

Someone decides that the best way to tell the twins apart is to tie a red ribbon to Freyr. Luke doesn’t tell anyone that he’s seen one toddler remove the ribbon the other, or that he’s seen them puzzle through how to tie it back on– and succeed. 

————

There comes a day when Luke can tell the twins apart. One is gentler, slightly– the one that learns to tie knots before he learns to untie them, the one that greets Luke more eagerly, the one that looks out windows. That one has familiar eyes, a familiar smile, that one is– he’s almost willing to believe it – his Ion. This time, this is Ion, anyway, he decides, and the other twin is Freyr. He tells people as much, and no one questions it, not even the twins.

It will be eleven years until the Scored end of the world.

————

Mohs did not fund Project Glory. He doesn’t know what it was. Luke learns this when he makes an off-hand comment about it in front of Tritheim and a few Maestros, and they all look at him like he has three heads. 

No one seems to know what Project Glory was, except that it was something to do with Malkuth. 

A girl-soldier called Captain Oslo stops Luke afterwards and asks if he needs someone to run an investigation. She’s too young to be a spy, she’s Tear’s age, the age Tear once was and would be, and her expression is so serious, Luke hates it.

“There is no need for such things, thank you,” he says, instead of saying anything that’s on his mind. Captain Oslo frowns slightly.

“They could be hiding something, sir,” she says. “Plotting against you.” Her voice is staccato-quick. 

“In which case, I can protect myself just fine,” Luke replies. “I promise.” Captain Oslo doesn’t look convinced. 

“Maestro Mohs is sneaking around behind your back, sir,” she says. “In secret passageways. Below-ground.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” Luke assures her, and wonders why the girl looks so familiar. Maybe it’s the hair. She’s almost got Cecille hair. “Please don’t go looking for trouble.”

“Yes, sir,” says the girl, bowing shortly. “I… I just wanted you to know I’m on your side, sir.” 

————

Mohs vanishes for a solid week, at one point, and comes back with a cold, calculating look like he knows something. He defers to Luke now without batting an eye, and that’s bad because men like Mohs only defer when they know themselves to be perfectly secure. Captain Oslo stalks him for a month, but comes up with nothing.

“He must be getting instructions somewhere,” she says. “He must.” This is something Luke should know, isn’t it? He’s been there before. But it’s been Mohs or Van or maybe Dist behind everything every time, and Van is in Keterberg and Dist– Saphir is safe and sound and monitored, and Mohs is getting instructions somewhere. 

But he doesn’t leave the cathedral. He no longer even goes to Kimlasca.

It will be ten years until the Scored end of the world. 

————

Ion gets sick. His body is wracked with pain every time he tries to cast an arte. Freyr watches his suffering with distant curiosity, and Luke lectures him about compassion and empathy. It’s probably pointless, but Jade is somewhere out there and in this life they don’t call him Necromancer, so maybe there is something to be done here. 

“If he dies, will I be the real one?” Freyr asks. 

“No,” says Luke. “If he dies you’ll just be the one left alive.” How is he even supposed to put this into words? “You’re both real, Freyr. You always were.”

————

A letter arrives from Belkend in the neat cramped hand of Saphir’s anonymous adult supervisor. It’s probably Tamara. Luke hasn’t gotten an anonymous adult letter in years, if only because Saphir is an actual adult now.

_A relative of yours stopped by the Fon Machine Lab the other day. Older gentleman. He asked around after Saphir, and Saphir threw a wrench at his head and screamed every time he tried to say anything. I suggest you come and deal with this, and hurry. We’ve tried. He’s asking for you and the Professor, and he bit Spinoza._

Luke drops everything and hurries. 

————

Saphir throws a wrench at Luke, too, when he sees him, and shrieks that he won’t go to Daath, he won’t. Spinoza’s sporting bruises. Tamara looks like she hasn’t slept in a week. 

“Was it that man who set him off?” Luke asks. Spinoza shrugs, but Tamara nods firmly. 

“I’m not entirely sure what happened,” she admits. “I didn’t leave them alone for more than two minutes.” Luke doesn’t say that two minutes can be a very long time, that two minutes could, under a certain set of circumstances, save the world or doom it. Tamara may already know things like that. 

No one seems capable of supplying a description. Saphir, once he’s assured no one is taking him away, curls in his chair and says that the man smelled like choking and echoes. Spinoza says the man looked respectable. Tamara grimaces, says she’s bad at faces, and that he was dressed like he belonged to the Order of Lorelei. 

“Do you want Professor to come get you?” Luke asks. Saphir shakes his head violently. 

“They’ll want her dead,” he mumbles. “They’ll want all of us dead. I don’t like this anymore.” He sniffles helplessly, and Luke’s struck again by how young he looks. There’s something in the water in Keterberg, maybe, because none of Professor Nebilim’s students die when they are killed and Jade looked in his twenties when he was in thirty-five and Saphir, at almost twenty-five looks like a long-legged fifteen-year-old. 

“I’m sorry,” says Luke, for lack of anything else to say. 

“He even used your name,” says Saphir. “He stole it. He’s not Cantor Grants, you are.” Only that’s not true at all, it’s Luke who steals names, isn’t it? Wasn’t it always?

It will be a little over nine years until the Scored end of the world.


	8. Daath and Yulia City

Back in Daath, Captain Oslo is being seriously considered for a promotion. Luke makes a note that at almost-eighteen, she is too young to be a major. He hates Daath and its child soldiers. The girl knocks on his door again, all impeccable uniform and messy blonde hair. He’s still not sure why she’s familiar. Maybe he knows a relative of hers. Maybe he’d seen her replica somewhere. 

“Have I don’t something wrong, sir?” Captain Oslo asks him as soon as he lets her in. He stares blankly because he’s thinking about Saphir and stolen names, not about her promotion. “Is– Is my work inadequate?”

“Of course not,” Luke says with a heavy sigh. “You’re fine. You’re just too young. Give it some time.” Jade was a major at twenty, he thinks. “Two years, then it’s yours.” The girl’s eyebrows furrow, and she stares at her feet.

“I … I don’t follow, sir,” she says. “Is it something in the Score?” He genuinely has no idea what her Score is. Oslo. The name isn’t familiar. Maybe the trouble was that no one stole it. If someone had, he’d have known it. 

“Oh, hang the Score,” he mutters, instead of saying something useful. Captain Oslo looks up sharply, and Luke bites his tongue. Stupid, stupid. Shouldn’t have said that. 

“Sir?” she prompts. He’s so tired. He wants to answer her, to say something, but the words die on his lips. He’s so tired. Why are they all so young? “Sir!” His vision blurs. He really should remember, Lorelei would remember but he’s not Lorelei, he's only human. 

————

When he wakes, bone-tired and with a splitting headache, Captain Oslo is at his side in the infirmary. She looks worried, and the expression makes her look more like Tear than like anyone else she could possibly be supposed to be. Mystearica Fende is a little girl on Hod, and her name won’t ever be Tear Grants, and Luke misses all of his friends desperately in that moment, so desperately it makes him choke. 

“What’s the matter, sir?” Captain Oslo asks, forcing her sharp voice gentle as she helps him sit up. He wants to scream and cry and stop hurting once and for all, because it’s times like this that he feels like he can feel the world and the whole world hurts. Nine years. A little over nine years. And then what? He doesn’t scream, and catches his breath more easily than he once had. 

“My apologies, Captain,” he says steadily. “I must be coming down with something.” 

“I see,” says the girl. “If I may ask, what happened in Belkend?” It feels like a leap of logic, but Luke has probably been even more harried since his return, and Captain Oslo seems like an honest person, so he tells her.

“Someone has been using –“ Van’s, Tear’s– “my last name,” he says. “As Cantor Grants. And I haven’t the foggiest notion for what.” For recruiting God Generals, he thinks, but that’s stupid. Just because whoever it was went after Saphir doesn’t mean…

“Your last name, sir?” Captain Oslo echoes, baffled. “So, pretending to be you, or your relative?” Luke nods, then instantly regrets the gesture when a pain like a knife travels from the base of his skull through his forehead and his teeth. “That’s… odd. My– I don’t think there’s a record of any other Grantses in the Order, not for centuries.” 

“Yes,” Luke says vaguely. It’s a name from Yulia City, after all. The Watchers wouldn’t be in anyone’s records, because they aren’t supposed to interfere. The only Grantses would be the ones sent up to deal in worldly matters, like Tear and Van. Luke knows all of this. He gets the distinct feeling he’s missing something. 

“Sir.” Captain Oslo’s voice has gone sharp again. Apparently she can only be gentle for short periods of time. “If there is something you need me to do, please tell me. I can– you’ve done so much for the Order, sir. I want to support you.” 

————

Luke has to think hard to remember how to get back to Yulia City, but he does remember, and he marches down there with Captain Oslo at his side. Her eyes shine with unabashed curiosity, even as she follows him down a vaulted passageway with miasma flowing outside it. 

“A city, down here?” she asks, almost too loudly. 

“For those who watch the Score unfold,” Luke explains. She takes a long look around, then nods.

“Hang the Score, sir,” she says. She’d make a good God General. The thought makes Luke blink.

Ten years older, and under a false name, Giselle Oslo did make a good God General, didn’t she? A good God General and a good teacher for a little girl named Grants.

————

They walk into Yulia City, and they have to fight their way back out. The Watchers keep soldiers too, after all. Luke has enough command of his hyperresonance by now to stun rather than kill, and he flees the city dragging the girl who won’t be Legretta the Quick, not in this lifetime, after him. They’re above-ground and choking on water, but at least it’s water and not miasma, when Luke remembers who didn’t meet him this time, who met him every time before. 

Teodoro Grants is no longer in Yulia City. There are two men named Grants with the Score’s foreknowledge digging in their heels in Outer Lands, two visions of the future, two mutually exclusive absolutes. 

————

He doesn’t know what to do, so he writes to Professor Nebilim and tells her everything he dares. She tells him to hang the Score too, though in more polite terms, and asks if he’s going to give more people the title of God General. It is war, after all, she says, and he is for all intents and purposes the head of the Order of Lorelei. 

He can’t do that. He won’t. He won’t. He can’t.

Nothing good ever came of God Generals. 

————

Ion’s illness doesn’t last, exactly, but it never really fades. He and Freyr switch places, sometimes, when Ion is too weak or woozy to carry out a particular task or if one or the other wants to be in a particular place in a particular time, and really only Luke catches them doing it.  
He won’t tell. Somehow, it’s better this way– Luke never met the original Ion, but Freyr grows less vicious with time. He doesn’t use his brother’s name to hurt anyone, either– when he’s being Ion, he’s a perfect body-double, sweet and sincere. 

————

Captain Oslo, bless her soul, manages to lock the route into Yulia City. It isn’t a permanent solution, but it’s enough to cut Mohs off from his benefactor and cut the cathedral off from the Score. Luke asks her how she did it.

“It’s made up of glyphs, sir, so I wrote them down and sent them to your Dr. Gneiss in Belkend,” she says like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “He seems to think I’m a God General too,” she adds with something like a smile. “Or maybe that I’m an extension of you, sir. He wasn’t very… clear.”

The lock isn’t permanent, but it makes a lot of things more difficult for a lot of people for quite some time, and that’s good enough for now.

————

Seven years before the Scored end of the world, Luke Fon Fabre disappears from his bedroom in Baticul. 

The Score is funny like that.


	9. Kimlasca, mostly

Seven years before the Scored end of the world, Luke Fon Fabre disappears from his bedroom in Baticul. There’s no sign of a struggle– the bed is neatly made, the floor is clean, and no clothes are missing besides the ones he wore. A window is open, and a curtain flutters in the breeze, but everyone in Fabre manor swears up and down that there is no way a ten-year-old could climb down the wall outside. The boy has vanished– vanished as though he had never existed at all. 

His cousin Natalia neither screams nor cries when she finds out. She’s the sort of quiet little thing that doesn’t scream or cry very often at all. She hears out the report with her head tilted to the side, then nods. 

“I suppose… maybe it’s in the Score,” she says, but she’s her mother’s daughter and her mother is from Malkuth and only believes in politics. “It must be, mustn’t it?” she says, but she’s born outside the Score and every breath she takes breaks it. 

No one thinks to notice the other girl in the room, Natalia’s blonde lady-in-waiting-in-training, who balls her hands into fists and closes her eyes to hide tears when she hears the report. No one thinks to mind her, so they leave her and the princess alone together and two hours later Meryl Oakland is gone too. She’s a steady sort of girl, so she walks right out a door, and her mother finds Natalia sitting alone in her room and brushing out her long, dark hair. 

“Highness, where’s Meryl?” Sylvia Oakland asks, her blood running cold with a mother’s instincts. Natalia pauses. 

“She left. I think she’s going to find Luke,” she says. The look in her eyes is always distant, like she doesn’t see the world around her at all, but that’s not true. Natalia may see more of the real world than most girls her age. “She loves him, you know. They love each other. That’s in the Score, of course, but it’s in them too.”

Meryl’s father pleads his case to the head of the Oracle Knights, and can barely recognize the man he knew in Chesedonia years ago. The God General recognizes him, though, and his hands shake when he demands every single detail of the vanishings. 

————

It shouldn’t be happening like this. With human fomicry just a theory, there is no reason why Luke Fon Fabre should be anywhere other than home. There is no reason for any of it, and Luke– the God General Luke– hates the Score with every fiber of his being. 

Saphir is in Belkend, safely under lock, key, and supervision. Jade is in Grand Chokmah, doing classified things in classified places that log his classified movements. Van is in Keterberg, learning about healing artes and the Planet Storm and history. Mohs is literally within Luke’s field of vision regularly. 

Teodoro Grants is missing in action. 

Luke marches into Choral Castle on memory, but there are no artifacts and no fon machines and no glyphs carved into walls in Saphir’s flowery script. There is no sign of – of the missing boy, or of the girl who went to find him. 

There is no sign of him on Hod, either, though a new school and a training ground have been built over the collapsed base. Mary Gardios wields a sword as well as her brother might, in a different life. She’ll inherit, of course. She’s the eldest. Her brother Guy is gentle and studious and builds fon machines that send light dancing across the ocean. Neither one has seen Duke Fabre’s son, or anyone who may look like him. Mystearica Fende is nine years old and is rarely seen herself. They know she’s there, though, because she sings in front of open windows, and her hymns are so beautiful that people already say she is Yulia reborn. 

Luke walks into Yulia City with Major Oslo at his side. The Watches spit fire and hatred, but they aren’t hiding the children either. Why would they? They watch. Teodoro Grants is the one who has gone to put the world right, and they will watch. They don’t know where he is either. Major Oslo shoots out a few windows to prove a point.

Oracle Knights are sent out to scour every nook and cranny two children could possibly hide in. It isn’t right. None of it is right. Luke stops sleeping.

————

One day, a week and a half in, he hears Major Oslo staccato-snap that no-one-is-allowed-in-without-clearance. 

“We don’t need clearance, we have a note from Professor,” insists one of the interlopers in a high, rather plaintive voice that Luke knows all too well. Looks like Saphir has been dragged to Daath after all. 

“Indeed.” And that’s definitely Jade. “Or, more aptly, we do have clearance, and from Locrian Colonel Gelda Nebilim. Now, I’m not entirely familiar with Daath’s military structure, but where I come from a colonel outranks a major, isn’t that right?”

“Locrian Colonel Gelda Nebilim retired,” says Major Oslo with feeling, though Luke can’t be sure what feeling, so he picks the moment to intercede. 

“Jade, don’t pick fights,” he orders wearily. “Sorry, Giselle. I do actually know those two.” Major Oslo frowns. Saphir flails a rather crumpled piece of paper in Luke’s general direction. 

“We have a note,” he repeats. “Also Jade thinks he knows how to find where the missing kid is and I think he’s right.”

“There are two missing children,” Major Oslo says. Jade rolls his eyes.

“Well, I think I can locate one of them. The Fabre boy. I’m afraid I know very little about the girl.” He’s clutching a fondisc. “Cantor Grants, what have you got to lose?” 

“You won’t lose,” says Saphir. “It’s a matter of resonance.”

————

It is indeed a matter of resonance. Jade’s right, and Saphir is right, because of course they are right. They’re experts on this sort of thing. They trace the echo of Lorelei’s power, the power Luke and his original share to a cave in a cliff that Luke hasn’t thought about in decades. It doesn’t have a name, right now, because there is no engineer with too much time on his hands who would pluck place name out of an ancient text and stake a claim to Ortion Cavern, not in this life, because Saphir is clutching Jade’s hand and looking around with genuine curiosity.

“This place is hideous,” he declares after a solid two minutes of staring. 

“It’s a cave, what do you even expect?” says Jade. 

Luke follows the path he has walked before through the cavern without thinking about it. He’s thinking about echoes and monsters and the Score and Lorelei. There is only the memory of cages and machinery here, only memory and the humming transmitter tuned to Lorelei’s frequency that’s sitting on Saphir’s lap. There’s a sound like something falling into water, and Major Oslo and Jade both snap to attack-readiness.

“Who’s there?” she snaps. “Show yourself.” Luke half expects giant monsters, even though of course that’s not right, that’s not even the right sound, but what emerges from the shadows is grim-faced girl in a muddy dress and a death grip on a bow that’s too big for her. Natalia– no, not in this life, in this life it’s Meryl. Major Oslo falters slightly. She isn’t a cruel woman. She doesn’t want to harm a child.

“Hey,” says Luke. “Meryl. Your parents are worried.” Meryl bites her lip. 

“I had to find Luke,” she says quietly. “I’m a seventh fonist. I could help.”

“Is Luke here?” Luke asks, feeling the sort of ridiculous that one can feel in a lucid dream. “I’m here to take you both home.” Meryl stares at him for a long moment, then decides, as Major Oslo lowers her weapons, that they may be trustworthy after all.

“He’s down there,” she says, pointing. “The old man took him to teach him about hyperresonance, and he doesn’t know I’m here.” She clutches the bow, if possible, more tightly. “I’m going to… I’m going to rescue Luke.” She is definitely not going to shoot anyone if Luke can help it. 

“How about you let us do that?” Major Oslo offers. “I may be stronger shot than you.” 

————

Major Oslo also doesn’t shoot the old man, because Luke suddenly hears a familiar echo, a memory, a voice he hasn’t heard in lifetimes on end, and he rushes in the direction Meryl is pointing, tumbles down a flight of rough-hewn steps and blunders through a blinding white-gold light that goes out as soon as he touches it. There are glyphs carved onto the floor in a far, far steadier and neater hand than Saphir’s, and the air is heavy with miasma, and there is a frightened red-haired boy on the floor. He looks up at Luke in a panic.

“You’re an Oracle Knight!” he half yells. Luke, to his credit, doesn’t yell back. He doesn’t say: I’m you, I’m your replica. He doesn’t say: I’m the Scion of Lorelei. He doesn’t say: this is all my fault.

“I’m here to rescue you,” he says. “Meryl’s dad asked me. Come on!” It’s entirely unfitting, but when he grabs the boy’s hand the voice in his head goes quiet again, and the air seems to clear just enough for Luke to look around and realize there isn’t anyone else down there. “Where’d the old man go?”

“He vanished,” the little Luke replies. “He– those glyphs, he uses them to disappear. I think he goes underground.” The glyphs glow, and the ground shakes. Luke picks the boy up and flees for both their lives.

————

Ortion Cavern doesn’t fall, because it isn’t supposed to. It isn’t Scored to. Luke sends Major Oslo to bring Meryl and her Scored love home, because he can’t face Baticul and the Fabre house, not again. In another life, Giselle Oslo would be a good teacher for a little girl called Grants, and in this one she may be a good teacher for a little girl called Oakland. Some people are cut out for some tasks. The Score is funny like that. 

“He disappears through the ground?” Saphir repeats, chewing on his glove. “If he does that, he knows where the echoes of things are.”

“And that’s bad,” Jade supplies. He’s very calm about it, because he can’t really be anything else. “I suppose we’ll have to stop him, won’t we?”

————

Professor Nebilim repeats her suggestion that Luke name more God Generals. There are fluctuations in the sephiroth trees, and she suspects someone is tampering with them, someone who has knowledge of the Dawn Age.

That’s something Luke doesn’t have, because he isn’t Lorelei. He doesn’t know the first thing about the Dawn Age. It’s all a matter of echoes, though, isn’t it?

————

Professor Nebilim turns her back for a day, just a day, when she’s called away to do something to do with running her school, and that’s when Van slips away. He goes straight to Daath and knocks on the door of the Commandant’s office. Major Oslo meets him there, and she’s in the process of telling him exactly what she thinks of interlopers, strangers, Keterberg, and Locrian Colonel Gelda Nebilim, when Luke opens the door with intent to hush them.

“There’s going to be a war anyway,” Van says as soon as he sees him. “Master Luke, the professor is right.” Of course the professor is right, she always is. Luke still glares. 

“Why are you here?” he asks. “I told you to stay up north.”

“I…” Van falters, but only for a moment. “I’m here to volunteer. You can look at my work– I’ve brought it with me.”

“He won’t make you a God General,” says Major Oslo. “Right, sir?”

Staring at the two of them over his doorstep, Luke gets the distinct feeling of prophecy, of the Score, of guarantees and absolutes and people who will be at the same place at the same time no matter how hard they try to avoid it. He ignores his with every fiber of his being.

“I have no intention of resurrecting that institution,” Luke says, and sends Van home.

————

Ten minutes later Van and Major Oslo catch Mohs scheming with a stranger who vanishes into a glyph in the wall when they confront him. 

Luke doesn’t declare them God Generals. Grand Maestro Tritheim, shaking with righteous anger, does.

The Score is funny like that.


	10. The Cathedral

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that was a hiatus. Sorry. This chapter is sort of mostly filler and setting stuff up, so that I can actually have the apocalypse plot start in the next one.

Luke, abruptly, starts dreaming of Baticul. It takes much too long for him to realize the dreams aren’t his– not until he sees Meryl hiding between trees and leaving shining footprints along the floors of the dream of Fabre manor. The dreams belong to Duke Fabre’s little son, the boy born with the power of Lorelei, who was Scored to fall in love with a gold-haired girl who wasn’t born a princess but would be a queen. 

It is six years until the Scored end of the world when Luke dreams of a closed room, his old room. Duke Fabre’s son sits cross-legged on the bed, and when he raises his head he looks right at his older double– and almost falls off of the bed in shock.

“Who’re you?” he asks as the dream catches him in the air and settles him back safely. “Why are you here– wait, this isn’t my room.” He’s observant. Asch was observant too, wasn’t he? 

“Sorry,” Luke says. “I think it’s mine, in a sense.” He eyes the boy curiously. “You’re dreaming, by the way.” The boy who won’t be Asch, not in this lifetime, frowns.

“Do you creep around in all my dreams?” he asks. He frowns like Asch, and his red hair is pulled back from his face. 

“Of course not,” says Luke. It’s a lie. He’s at least had flashes of them every night. “I just wanted to speak to you tonight.”

“Oh,” says the boy. He still looks doubtful, and he scrutinizes Luke’s face carefully. “Aren’t you… aren’t you with the Order of Lorlei?” Luke nods. “I remember you. Commandant Grants, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. And you’re Luke, aren’t you?” It still feels uncomfortable, saying that. He still remembers Asch forsaking his name, after all. “Luke fon Fabre.” It’s the boy’s turn to nod, a perfect mirror of Luke’s gesture. 

“Are… Is it Daathic artes? Talking to me in my dreams?” A lot of things can be excused with Daathic artes. It doesn’t do to lie to Luke fon Fabre, though. Bad things come from lying to Luke fon Fabre. The thought almost makes Luke Grants laugh aloud. 

“No, I don’t think so,” he says instead of laughing. “I can trespass on your dreams because we’re isofons. It’s a matter,” he explains, “of resonance.” A heavy tome on the matter, attributed to Dr. Balfour, helpfully materializes on the bed. Duke Fabre’s son picks it up curiously.

“We have the same fonic frequency, you mean,” he murmurs. “That’s odd.”

Odd would be putting it mildly.

————

There are still fluctuations in the Sephiroth trees. Jade attempts to requisition Saphir and his work from Belkend but is denied four times over. There are still places where the Malkuth army has no power, after all. Van tries to requisition Saphir and his work from Belkend in the name of the God Generals and gets hit on the head with a wrench and chased through half the compound by one of Saphir’s machines for his troubles. At least the Kimlascans have stopped trying. 

Arietta is brought to Daath proper, briefly, and spends the entire time hiding behind a plush toy. Freyr and Ion meet her rather unofficially, and when they talk they seem like ordinary ten-or-eleven-year-olds. Freyr even laughs– and at a joke, at that, rather than at someone’s suffering – and that’s almost more than Luke can hope for. 

In his dreams, Duke Fabre's son says he's afraid of his cousin Natalia, afraid of the distance in her stare and the flatness of her affect. He wishes he could marry Meryl instead. Sheridan starts work on what will become the Albiore.

There are five years to go until the Scored end of the world.

————

Mystearica Fende tries to run away from home the next year, a little slip of a girl in a long dress. Count Gardios's soldiers catch her within half an hour. It's the longest she's ever been outside. Mary Gardios throws a fit about inappropriate parenting techniques, her father tries to put her and her brother under house arrest for disobedience, and Mary carries out a minor coup. While she and her father hash out details of who now runs what, Guy Gardios catches the first ferry pointed at Daath and knocks on the door of the commandant of the Oracle Knights.

"Please say you need someone who is good with fon machines," he says, when Luke asks him what in Yulia's name he's doing.

"What you need is clearance," says Giselle Oslo. Guy fumbles through his pockets and eventually thrusts a crumpled sheet of paper at Luke.

"I uh, I have a note." What he has is a letter of almost-recommendation signed by Belkend's own Dr Gneiss.

"I get death threats from the man and you get an- an 'acknowledgement' of your 'intellect and talent'?" Van complains as he reads it. "That's completely ridiculous.”

"Maybe he prefers blonds," says Giselle Oslo flatly.

Luke considers concussing himself on his own desk. Three God Generals. Alright. No more.

————

Three years until the Scored end of the world. Giselle Oslo begs family leave because her brother’s wife had very Unscored twins. 

“That’s good,” says Ion with a big smile when he finds out. “I dreamed about them. They’ll be happy now.”

————

That same year, Freyr catches a nine-year-old from Daath’s poorer district trying to enlist in the Oracle Knights. Anise Tatlin breaks both his mask and his nose when he confronts her, then bursts out crying because she thinks she’s punched the Fon Master. Luke intervenes hastily, and the girl chokes out a familiar story about family debts and a Maestro. Luke raises his eyebrows. 

“A Maestro is scamming people?” he asks in his best surprised voice. Anise nods and sniffles. “That’s improper as well as against the code. I’d love to help you, but this is something you should really report to the Grand Maestro.” Anise doesn’t know the Grand Maestro, but she cries on Luke and then cries on Tritheim and then cries on Guy, who’s turned up to see Mohs get yelled at and reassigned somewhere where he can’t talk to people. All considered, it’s a success. 

“That’s a cute doll,” says Guy with a brilliant smile, plucking Tokunaga off of the girl’s back. 

“Thanks,” Anise mumbles, wiping her face furiously with a borrowed kerchief. “My mom made him. He’s sort of useless.”

“Useless? Nonsense!” says Guy, in his best enter-the-amazing-Guy voice. Anise giggles.

————

There are two years until the Scored end of the world, and Luke is not going to let a ten-year-old be a God General. That’s just ridiculous. She’s too young for that, and too young for the war machine Guy Gardios has hidden in her doll. 

————

There are still two years until the Scored end of the world when Natalia renounces her position as princess. She does it very seriously, so seriously that no one dares override her, and explains that the throne would thus pass to the next person in line, to her cousin, Luke. She also, with the same seriousness, breaks off their engagement. Luke tries to argue, and she fixes him with a piercing stare.

“Don’t be absurd,” she says. “You’ll marry your Scored love.”

————

There are still two years until the Scored end of the world when Saphir covers every flat surface in his laboratory with an indecipherable code. Parts of it glow, occasionally. He doesn’t open the door for anyone except Jade, and the two of them sit in the center of the room and gaze at the walls, watching something only they can understand. 

The fluctuations in the sephiroth trees decrease, but it’s a calm before a storm. 

————

There is a little less than a year to go before the Scored end of the world when Luke and his isofon stop sharing dreams. At least he hopes they’ve stopped sharing them. Every time he closes his eyes he sees the golden glow of a hyperresonance and feels the unexpectedly terrifying void where Lorelei’s voice ought to be, and he hopes against hope that the boy in Baticul doesn’t dream of that as well. 

Luke stays awake and counts days, but he doesn’t know what he’s waiting for, not anymore.


	11. Malkuth, at-large

What happens, when the end of the world approaches, is this. Ion travels to Malkuth, with a glided mask hiding his face and puppet-wielding God-General-in-training at his side, to force the early evacuation of Akzeriuth. Since Jade is traveling from Grand Chokmah to Belkend, Ion and Anise travel in the company of the erstwhile Colonel Jasper Cadogan. It’s probably for the best. Jasper Cadogan is sensible. No one knows Ion is away, because Freyr is dolled up as Fon Master and playing his role admirably. At around the same time, Duke Fabre goes to Hod, orders to bargain with Count Gardios burning a hole in his pocket. He brings his son, because his son is his student and the heir to the throne, and because his son has politics in his blood as much as in his head. It’s perfectly sensible. Count Gardios seethes and Lady Mary schemes, and there isn’t a young Lord Gaillardia to be dealt with. 

Luke fon Fabre, after negotiations are concluded for the day wanders the grounds of Gardios manor, and turns with his sword drawn when he hears the crack of twigs breaking under light, running footsteps. Used to sparring with armored knights, he overcompensates the turn, and slams right into a girl in a floor-length gown. She puts up her hands and gives a little gasp of shock and pain, and Luke manages half of a curt apology.

It’s then that the world goes golden and glowing, like in those nightmares Luke hopes against hope he doesn’t share with his isofon in Daath. There’s a void in the nightmare where a voice ought to be ringing, echoing, resounding, but instead they fall in silence, through the golden light and into the dark.

————

Luke fon Fabre wakes up in unfamiliar territory. The ground is covered in little white flowers, and the girl sprawled among them is dainty and soft-edged, and her dark brown hair spreads beneath her like a fan. She is, Luke thinks before he really considers it, beautiful. She’s the same sort of beautiful that Natalia is, the sort that gives Luke the creeps when he looks for too long. 

She’s terrified when she wakes, and she pulls a knife from her coat and points it at him. She’s young, younger than Natalia, younger than Luke, with a face that’s baby-round and wide eyes that fix on his shoulder. Luke puts up his hands quickly in a hopefully international gesture of nonviolence, and internally curses his luck.

————

Neither one of them has any idea where they are. The girl – Mystearica, she’d said, before ducking her head and requesting he call her Tear – has never left Hod, and Luke may know Kimlasca but he knows it like a noble would, not like a traveler. He is fairly certain they are not in Kimlasca, but he can’t be sure. Tear clutches her knife in both hands, looks around, and hesitantly suggests they look for landmarks.

They find monsters instead, and that’s how he learns she’s a healer. She’s a very good healer, actually. The way she moves suggests a more intuitive grasp of the artes than Meryl has, and she sings an attacking liger to sleep. 

“Oh,” she says softly, once the monster is on the ground and Luke has a chance to impale it. “I wasn’t sure that would work in reality.” There is possibly a reason why she has never left Hod. 

———— 

By the time the news reaches the commandant in Daath, Ion, Anise, Luke, and Tear are all in Colonel Cadogan’s custody and powering out of Engeve like people with a very coherent mission. Also by the time the news reaches the commandant in Daath, Duke Fabre is once again trying to start a war on Hod, even as the island is rocked by inexplicable earthquakes that leave half of Feres flooded. It’s not a disaster yet, though, not yet– as long as Luke doesn’t get to Akzeriuth, as long as a war doesn’t start, it’s not a disaster yet. 

The commandant sends Van and Guy to head Luke and Tear off before they reach Akzeriuth. Luke can’t enter Akzeriuth. That’s just tempting the Score. On a similar note, Van can’t set foot on Hod. The commandant goes there himself, while Major Oslo takes charge of the evacuation efforts on Feres. 

“Your son caused a hyperresonance,” the commandant explains to Duke Fabre, and pretends he doesn’t see Lord Fende and Count Gardios go ashen with fear. “I doubt any real damage was done, but we have to bring him back.” Preferably back to Kimlasca, but honestly anywhere other than Akzeriuth would work at this point. He’s not going to be picky. “I’ve sent two of my associates to collect him and your daughter, Lord Fende. They should both be fine.”

“You have a daughter?” Duke Fabre asks, tilting his head in Lord Fende’s general direction curiously. “I was not informed.” Luke smiles blankly and hastily exits the conversation.

————

Van and Guy catch Colonel Cadogan’s landship halfway to the border. There is almost bloodshed, almost, before Anise recognizes them. 

“Commandant’s orders, sorry,” says Van, who looks a lot closer to his real age without a beard and with a mostly-honest apologetic smile. “Luke and… Mystearica…?” He trails off, then, staring at a girl who has his mother’s eyes and his former family’s seal embroidered on her clothes. The girl drops her gaze shyly.

“Y-you should call me Tear if that name is too long,” she says quickly. She doesn’t think about similarities because she doesn’t know she ever had a brother, though the thought does drift through her mind that this God General looks Hodian, that they both look Hodian, isn’t that odd? 

“Tear, then,” Guy says. “I’m Guy, that’s Van, we’re taking you home so that this lot can carry out their mission, okay?”

————

What happens at the end of the world approaches is this. A stranger arrives in Akzeriuth before the Malkuth army does, and he is the first to mention evacuation. No one believes there is need for it, but they let him tour the mines when he asks. He’s clearly a member of the Order of Lorlei, after all. Hyperresonance doesn’t hum beneath his fingers, and he doesn’t claim or seize glory, he is no being that the Score sees fit to warn people about, so he is led deep, deep, deep beneath the miners’ city, deep into the chasm that mortal modern greed had hewn, and he looks around and smiles. 

“Well, gentlemen,” he tells the miners. “It seems like you were right and my information was wrong. This mine doesn’t seem to be in danger of collapse. Still, would you humor an old man and let me write some protective glyphs?” 

Of course they let him, why wouldn’t they let him? So he engraves a neat line of them on the wall, reaching all the way from the floor to the ceiling. He could fill the chasm with them, fill the mine with them, but this has to do. There is no reason to draw attention to himself. The miners aren’t surprised when they don’t recognize a single symbol, because why would they recognize the details of the work of a member of the Order of Lorelei? 

When they turn their backs, the glyphs on the wall glow and hum in the same odd, directionless pattern as the ones that cover a laboratory in Belkend. In cases like this, it's really a matter of echoes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... You didn't think I was gonna leave Dist and his questionable lab decorations as a sidenote, did you?


	12. Approaching Akzeriuth

It definitely isn’t supposed to be like this. Luke – the commandant – isn’t entirely sure how it is really supposed to be, but he’s sure this isn’t it. The citizens of Feres are shipped safely off to the mainland, and Luke personally goes to stabilize the sephiroth beneath Hod.

It’s screaming. There is no other word for it. The light writhes beneath Luke’s hands, and it calls out for – something, something he can’t offer because he isn’t Lorelei. Lorelei could save them, Lorelei could end their pain, but Lorelei isn’t there and Luke is and he is so very deathly tired. He can hush it, and he feels like he’s hushing a child, like if he could take it in his arms and rock it that would be better somehow. He can offer only the echo of the sephiroth’s creator, only the echo of the ancient song. After hours on end, it hushes, hums, steadies, but it’s as tired as he is or more and there is nothing he can do about that. 

The commandant leaves it as is, then makes for the mainland to collect his young isofon and Yulia’s heir. Van and Guy can’t take them to Hod, because Van can’t set foot on Hod, not now and not ever, better not to tempt fate. The One Who Will Seize Glory cannot stand upon the land of his birth, and the Scion of Lorelei’s Power cannot enter the miners’ city. It’s easier to do that, the commandant thinks, than to try to avert the consequences. He comes to the mainland and is promptly inundated with information he doesn’t want. 

Foremost, Akzeriuth. Something is happening in Akzeriuth, almost every report insists, but they fail to explain what. Whatever it is is setting Luke’s teeth on edge. He closes his eyes and wishes for the long-silent voice of Lorelei to resound in his mind, to bring answers, but no answer comes. 

————

He goes to meet Van and Guy, as planned, but somehow it’s impossible for things like that to go smoothly. Guy is at the meeting point, alone and apologetic. 

“I did try to stop them,” he says a bit hopelessly. “You know how Van gets…” Luke grits his teeth, because he knows exactly how Van gets, exactly what Van is capable of. 

“Where are they?” he asks, instead of saying anything like that, because it isn’t relevant and Guy is really terribly young. It crosses the commandant’s mind that he’s lost track of his own age somewhere along the way. He hasn’t been seven for a very long time, anyway. 

“I really did try to stop them,” Guy repeats. “But when Van and Fabre Jr realized Colonel Cadogan was headed for Akzeriuth, they demanded to go with him.” A grin plays across his face. “I thought Anise was going to break their legs, honestly. Did you know–“

But the commandant isn’t listening anymore, he doesn’t care what Guy thinks he does or doesn’t know, he has alarm bells ringing in his ears. He turns on his heel, barks an order, and rushes to head them off.

————

At the same time, Jade Curtiss reaches Belkend and almost forgets to get out of his landship because he is reading reports of what is happening on Hod and Feres and in Akzeriuth, but he has a frantic and poorly-worded summons to answer. He marches through a half dozen doors and knocks on the last. 

“Saphir, it’s me. Let me in.” He gets no response, so he knocks again. “Saphir?” Saphir can’t be silent, and there is silence on the far side of the door. It’s off-putting. He hears a low, mechanical hum behind him, down the hall, and he turns. “Oh, there you are.”

“Jade! You came!” Saphir yelps. He looks like he’s been crying. Then again, he often does, as far as Jade can tell. 

“You summoned,” Jade deadpans in response. “What’s the matter?” Echoes, Jade thinks. Echoes are always the matter. Sometimes it seems like Saphir can see into the past the way Yulia Jue could see into the future. Saphir, of course, tears up again. “In words, if you can,” Jade adds wearily. He’s already written to Professor, of course, and she’s on her way too, but Jade’s closer by so he’s there first.

“I– yes.” Saphir takes a shuddering breath. “They– they’re moving, they’re angry, you see.” 

“Who are they?” Jade presses. Kimlasca has sent representatives to Hod, and Daath is sending representatives through Malkuth, but neither of those cases really imply movement because of anger. Saphir’s knuckles are white on the armrests of his chair. 

“They– they’re them,” he mutters, gesturing vaguely at the locked laboratory in front of them. “Those.” Jade’s eyes narrow. It’s not an entirely sufficient explanation, but Saphir is clearly upset beyond proper coherence. 

“Do you mean the sephiroth trees?” he asks. “Like in Professor’s notes?” They are called trees for a reason beyond their shape, after all, and they are growing and almost-living things. Almost living. Jade has hypothesized that he could recreate them, replicate them, but he has never thought to try. Saphir nods violently, then shakes his head. At Jade’s glare, he tries to elaborate. 

“Yes, but not only– trees don’t – don’t move around, not on their own– it’s people who can move a forest, isn’t it?” Saphir stares pleadingly into the space above Jade’s shoulder. “Even if it’s Scored that the forest will move.”

“Alright,” says Jade, who is vaguely aware that reference is being made to some old story. “So who is moving the forest?” If Saphir says it’s a vague them, Jade’s going to punch him right in the runny nose, so help him. To his credit, Saphir screws up his face in an attempt to speak an actual modern language understood by humans. 

“Well, it’s Scored to,” he explains. “So if it’s not Keter’s army moving it, it’s someone else’s, but it’s still moving.”

“And that’s… bad or good?” Jade prompts. No pause this time.

“Bad. Very bad.” Saphir sniffles. “It kills people.”

“Okay.”

“We need to stop it!”

“Okay. Where do we go?”

————

What happens in ND 2018 is this. The Scions of Lorelei’s power march into Akzeriuth within minutes of each other, and they bring their people with them. Power and calamity grow within them, untempered by the echoes of ancient things. The One Who Will Seize Glory stares down into the mines of Akzeriuth and calculates matters of time and poison. A girl who is the new bearer of an ancient bargain steps into miasma and the miasma knows her. A man named Grants plots a city’s downfall. A man named Grants leads the Oracle Knights. All of this is Scored.

What also happens in ND 2018 is this. The Demon Colonel of Daath, the woman who would conquer the Planet Storm, descends upon the miners’ city, and she descends as neither a plague nor a calamity but as a teacher summoned to help. This is not Scored. A teacher helping her students is such a small thing that is may well slip the minds of those who are concerned with matters of the world.


	13. Akzeriuth, Properly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Taking a bit of a detour this chapter, because Luke is being a rather useless messiah, oops. Anyway, this one's Nebilim-centric!

Gelda Nebilim is no fool. This bears repeating, because even the people who know her best sometimes forget it. She has been, over the course of her life, a soldier, a scientist, a killer, a traitor, a scholar, a teacher, sometimes a hero and sometimes a villain but never a fool. She is growing old, now, and when she descends upon Akzeriuth soldiers see the crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes and the old scholar’s slope in her shoulders and they may even feel the echo of blackboard chalk and ink that clings to her like a second skin, like armor fitted to her body. 

“Are you looking for someone, ma’am?” asks a soldier who is young enough to be the child of one or another of her students. 

“Yes,” she says. “I’m looking for Cantor Grants.” There are mercies society grants old soldiers and old schoolteachers, and the right to jump right over smalltalk is one of them. The young soldier nods, then looks confused. 

“Er, which one, ma’am?” 

“… Cantor Luke Grants,” she amends carefully. “Are there two Grantses running around Akzeriuth?”

“No, ma’am,” says the soldier. “Cantor Luke is here, but the older gentleman left yesterday, I believe.”

Gelda Nebilim is no fool. She knows– she’s known from the start – that the stranger her students had found on Mount Roneal had given a false name and a falser-still identity. She also knows that people change their names for good reason, especially people who a gentle to odd children and only smile when they are distracted and try to bury themselves in saving others, and that there are more important things to know about someone than a name.

“I see,” she says. “Please take me to Cantor Luke Grants. There is no time to waste.”

————

The further into the city she goes, the more certain of that she is. There is no time to waste. Luke has written to her, vaguely, about a coming disaster– he may couch it in loftier language now than he did in Keterberg, but he’s a poor liar anyway, and the truth has a way of drifting through – and he’s terrified. Saphir has been writing to her about his studies– incoherently as ever, skipping pieces that he shouldn’t, lingering where he shouldn’t, sending her half-erased diagrams of Dawn Age machines and pressed dried flowers at the same time – and she knows he’s in over his head. It’s times like this she wishes Jade would write, but Jade has sent her only one letter in six months and that was to politely inform her Saphir was probably having a panic attack.

The mines are billowing miasma, and Gelda thinks this is what the Dawn Age must have felt like, once. Van is perched atop an outcropping, staring down into the mines and looking like he’s thinking very hard even as he barks out evacuation orders. He’s looking for someone, she realizes, looking into the smog for signs of someone emerging from the depths. A Malkuth officer seems to be in charge of the evacuation, rushing back and forth with a cloth over his face. There’s a girl, a child, dressed like an Oracle Knight, half-supporting a swooning figure not much bigger than she is. There is an order of evacuation written and signed by Nephry Curtiss that’s being waved at people rather violently. Luke is, apparently, somewhere underground. Idiot. Gelda marches up to the Oracle Knight girl. 

“Get out of here,” she orders, and the girl actually moves a solid five paces away from the mine, her friend still leaning heavily on her. Then she turns.

“We’re supposed to help!” 

“I understand that, but you’ll be no help to anyone dead, you know.” A pause. Someone is yelling, and Gelda catches the word ‘collapse’. She thinks of Hod. “What’s your name?”

“Anise,” says the girl unwillingly, glaring daggers. 

“Anise, I think you should get your friend out of here.”

“We’re supposed to–“ Anise starts, but she falls silent as her friend has a coughing fit. She tightens her grip on him and tries to cover his masked face with part of her jacket. 

“Out,” Gelda repeats. “I’m sure you know the evacuation route.” There are mercies society grants old soldiers and old schoolteachers, and the right to give orders and know they will be obeyed is one of them. 

————

Luke Grants is having a hushed argument with a pair of teenagers in a half-collapsed mineshaft while miasma swirls around them. The scientist in Gelda notes that it’s reacting to them, to all three of them, and that’s fascinating if dangerous. All the rest of her scowls. 

“Luke!” she snaps. Luke and the red-haired boy both turn, and Luke’s eyes go wide at the sight of her, and he lets out a low noise that’s almost a whimper. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says, and he sounds like he’s trying very hard not to slur his words. “Not you, please not you. The collapse–”

“– Won’t happen,” Gelda finishes with far more certainty than she actually feels. “You’ve changed too much of it already. That doesn’t, however, mean you should linger here while an evacuation order is in effect.”

“There are people in there!” the red-haired boy argues, and Gelda looks at him properly for the first time. He looks almost grown, and something in the shape of his face and the earnestness of his green eyes makes him look like a younger mirror of Luke. “I heard them! We need to help!”

“We– This place–“ Luke mutters helplessly. “The Score–“

“Hang the Score!” the boy shouts. “I’m not leaving those people to die! Tear, come on– I’ll need a healer.” There’s some sort of commotion behind her. Gelda intercepts Tear, who flails rather less than her counterpart. 

“I’m a healer,” says Gelda firmly. “Tear, was it? I’ll take over for you here, alright?” The girl nods silently and turns away. 

“You can’t– you’ll – listen, the collapse–“ Luke looks like he’s going to fall right over, and Gelda puts out a hand to steady him. 

“I’m listening. What needs to happen for the collapse to happen?” she asks. 

“Lorelei.” This is like trying to coax a straight answer out of Saphir. She nods encouragingly. “Lorelei’s isofons.”

“There’s no time–“ the red-haired boy starts, and then a very familiar voice cuts him off. 

“Why are there so many people here? Jade, there aren’t supposed to be so many people here!”

“Hello, Professor,” says Jade. The ground beneath Luke’s feet cracks.

————

The Score, it seems, doesn’t account for any number of little things, like teachers crossing continents or scientific experiments or perfect living isofons or flight, because what happens in the mines of Akzeriuth is this.

The ground beneath Luke’s feet cracks, and Saphir catches him, hovering clumsily as more miasma fills the air around them. There is a crackle of golden light, flickering under the fingers of the red-haired boy, but Tear turns to him and speaks sharply.

“Don’t! We caused an earthquake on Hod, remember! An earthquake here would…” She trails off, looking around fearfully, and the ground rumbles anyway. The red-haired boy edges toward the wall, then thinks better of it when part of the wall falls off at his feet. 

“We’d all probably die,” says Jade with a smile fixed on his face. 

“Well, I’m sure no one wants that,” Gelda replies just as evenly. “So. Children, out.” Somewhere up the tunnel, a man is calling for someone named Mystearica. Tear turns that way, grabs the red-haired boy by the wrist, and runs. 

————

In the room far below, a pattern of glyphs sends an undulating glow up and down the walls. Saphir lets out a high-pitched wail when he sees it, and Jade raises his eyebrows. 

“Look at that, you did calculate it right,” he says. Saphir stops wailing and glares. 

“Of course I did,” he says, “I’m a genius!”

Saphir’s genius, impressive as it occasionally is, extends purely to reading and interpreting the glyphs– some relic of the Float War, Gelda thinks – but he can only exist as a passive observer. She scrutinizes the wall before her. The language is unfamiliar but the pattern suggests it’s an inscription of an arte of some kind, an activation, and there’s something in it that makes her think of Daathic artes and curse slots. She’s seen a few too many curse slots in her time. But what is it activating? The low hum feels almost mechanical, but neither Saphir nor Jade seem to hear it, and it is with a cold dread pooling in her stomach that Gelda turns to the dazed man slung uncomfortably half over Saphir’s chair. Golden light swirls around Luke but does spread, giving the impression of a man in a glimmering golden bubble. 

Well. That won’t do at all. 

Gelda has always been always calm in times of crisis. She can’t fathom being anything else. She shuts her eyes and follows the path left by the arte, matches each point to a counterpoint, each action to a reaction, and feels the hum of the thing fade into near-silence. That’s better. It’s quiet now, besides the distant sounds of suffering, nice and quiet…

“Professor,” says a cool voice beside her. “Professor Nebilim?” She should open her eyes. She should absolutely answer that voice. Someone has a hand on her arm, but her arm feels a world away. That’s not good. She focuses on trying to find her voice, at least. 

“Professor! What’s wrong?”

“Professor Nebilim!”

“I don’t think I did that right,” she says very carefully, and then her world goes black.


	14. Somewhere in Rugnica

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to Luke now, because he's got a canon personality.

Luke passes out somewhere in the mines of Akzeriuth and wakes up to a very serious discussion about whether or not fomicry could be used to make new sephiroth trees. 

“I feel like we should ask Professor,” Saphir says dubiously. “It’s not like an actual tree, you know.”

“It can’t be that different,” says Jade. “If your ramblings have taught me anything it’s that the Dawn Age wasn’t half as creative as we think it.” There is a high whine in response. “What? Consistent application of the same theories and all that. I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

“Well… well we should really ask Professor,” says Saphir.

“Listen,” says Jade. Luke forces his eyes open and tries to sit up, before anything else can be said. His head spins and he nearly falls off his … bed? He’s not sure he’s on a bed, but he very nearly falls off of it anyway. Someone catches him gently. 

“Cantor Grants!” Saphir chirps. He doesn’t sound thirty-five. 

“Steady there,” says Jade. “You should probably lie back down.” Oh, that’s Jade holding him up, then. Luke wonders where Professor Nebilim is. He has a vague memory of her standing in the mines, casting some arte, but before and after that is a blur. 

“Professor Nebilim?” Luke half-asks. Jade sets him on the … not a bed. It seems more like a table actually. “The– Akzeriuth.”

“It’s alright, I promise,” says Saphir.

“… Yes,” says Jade. “Don’t worry. We’ll fix it.” That’s not very comforting. He blacks back out.

————

When Luke wakes up properly, he really is in a bed. A brief interrogation of the rather skittish young man in Malkuth blue who is guarding him yields the following information. Akzeriuth has not fallen. The evacuation has been successful. Some people are ill, but no one is dead. Professor Nebilim is among the ill. She had gone into the depths of the mines with Saphir and Jade and Luke, and had had to be carried out. Akzeriuth stands empty and will likely be abandoned. Malkuth has lost territory there. 

It is something like a relief, even though nothing is going quite as it should. Luke bluffs and bullies his way into Professor Nebilim’s room, to find her pale and wan and bedridden but alive. 

“You’re alive!” Luke blurts at the sight of her. She glares back at him. 

“You’re an idiot,” she replies. “Lorelei. Honestly.”

“I wasn’t lying,” says Luke. Professor Nebilim raises her eyebrows. 

“… This had better impress me more than your resonant fluctuations,” she says. 

“It will,” says Luke, and he launches into a slightly out of order explanation. 

————

Half an hour later, Gelda Nebilim has her face in her hands and is laughing weakly. Luke sits at her bedside uncomfortably, half convinced he's driven the woman mad. Then she raises her head, and there’s an amused gleam in her reddish eyes.

“Alright,” she says. “So. Lorelei is trying to keep me alive. Now that’s something.” 

“Sorry,” says Luke. “I should have said something. Something earlier, I mean. Probably in Keterberg.” 

“I wouldn’t have believed you,” says Professor Nebilim steadily. “Now it makes a degree of sense. Would I be correct to assume that Saphir and Jade would tell me something similar about you, were I to ask them?” 

“Probably,” Luke admits. “I… I’m sorry you were hurt. You weren’t supposed to be at Akzeriuth.”

“No,” she says. “I was supposed to be dead, after all. Or does my evil replica count as me? Anyway, it’s not particularly surprising.” She scrutinizes Luke closely, then shakes her head again. “Replicas. I ask you. Am I the only person around who can keep Jade on a leash?”

“Emperor Peony can, eventually,” Luke says. Eventually is the key word. Professor Nebilim scoffs quietly. “No, seriously.”

“I can only imagine how well that turned out,” she says with a grimace. “Alright. Fine. Just… please clearly articulate what else needs to not happen for the world not to end this year, and let me handle it.” It’s Luke’s turn to scoff.

“Nice of you to offer, but you can’t exactly walk. Or do you mean to save the world from your hospital bed?” 

“Oh hush.” She waves a hand vaguely. “Saphir already promised to sneak me out of here in a flying chair. I don’t have time for bed rest.”

“That’s … dangerous,” says Luke a little helplessly. She fixes him with a cool stare.

“What else do we need to stop?” she repeats. 

He has to pause and think about it. Hasn’t he covered all his bases? Hod and Akzeriuth haven’t fallen, so the Outer Lands as a whole won’t fall, right? The only thing that remains is the other Cantor Grants, Teodoro Grants, the one who is trying to force the Score back on track… Unbidden, Ion’s voice drifts through Luke’s mind, speaking of the plague that will end the world, carried from Malkuth to Kimlasca by a single man. Surely not that. Surely that can’t happen. It hasn’t happened any of the times he’s been alive.

“We have to prevent the Outer Lands from collapsing into the miasma,” he says firmly. “If there is some way to reinforce the sephiroth trees– they’re reaching their limit.”

————

Only, there is something of a problem here. The Outer Lands collapsing into the miasma is not a part of the Score of Final Judgement. It is a part of the memory of the Scion, and maybe in centuries to come it would be termed the Score of the Scion, but it has never been Chanted by Yulia Jue nor has it been committed in writing upon a fonstone. Teodoro Grants and his people guide the world from Yulia City, deep within the Qliphoth, and all they know of the Score is what has been written, what has been spoken reverently since the end of the Dawn Age. 

In ND 2018, the young Scion will turn power to calamity in the miners’ city. Thereafter, Rugnica will be enveloped in war, and Malkuth will lose territory, leading to an era of unprecedented prosperity for Kimlasca. In ND 2019, the Kimlascan army will march north and raze the villages of Rugnica before sacking Grand Chokmah and staining the throne with the blood of Malkuth’s last emperor. As their howls of victory spread, so will a plague born of corpses of the dead. In ND 2020, the plague will envelop Malkuth and be brought into Kimlasca by a single man, and the Light of the Sacred Flame will approach the city of fon machines to gain the use of a forbidden power meant to end the plague. 

And thus Auldrant will be destroyed by the miasma and turned to dust, and thus it all will end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... Because I mean, that's the actual real Score, isn't it?


	15. Rugnica, Grand Chokmah

It’s still ND 2018. An old man walks into a small town in Rugnica. No one looks twice at him, but his sharp eyes take in everything. After some deliberation, he picks a girl from the crowd and beckons her over. They chat, briefly, and he passes her a small package. It contains a book, a lie, and the girl will pass it on. 

It’s still ND 2018 when the same man passes a different book to a boy-soldier on the outskirts of Baticul. It is much the same as the first, but it too contains a lie. This boy will pass the book on to his superiors, and between him and the girl in Malkuth they brew chaos. 

It is still ND 2018 when Rugnica is enveloped in riots, if not war, and Kimlascan instigators cross the border to support the rebels. At the end of ND 2018 the Malkuth army marches in, with the emperor preaching peace while his generals preach order. What follows are three weeks of disaster. 

It is barely ND 2019 when the Kimlascan army marches north, on the tenuous excuse that they are saving their own citizens who are trapped in the chaos. It is not, at least it is not only, the Kimlascans who put Rugnica and its fields of grain to the torch, but Rugnica burns. It burns for days. 

It is ND 2019 when the commandant in Daath and his loyal God Generals intervene. Van Grants shouts down a legion of soldiers, and his voice rings from the mountains, like in Dawn Age legends, like in children’s stories. The commandant begs and pleads with leaders and coerces them into ten failed peace talks. It isn’t enough. Peony wants peace, but there is iron in his gaze and he doesn’t bend. Duke Fabre wants fire and blood, Count Gardios is leading a Malkuth brigade personally, and Ingobert announces that Kimlascan victory is written in the Score and refuses to cooperate. 

The commandant stalls the army. It’s something. Rugnica is still a plain of dust, and refugees are spilling over the Malkuth border, but the army doesn’t march towards Grand Chokmah. An old man chats with soldiers on the outskirts of the military camp. Ten of them step out to talk to him. Seven of them step back in. When Peony returns to Grand Chokmah in a huff, he has three new shadows.

————

It is ND 2019 when the plague starts to spread. At first it seems like nothing, like a cough or a cold, but the trouble with miasma is that it spreads insidiously and slowly. By the time you can see it, there is already too much of it. It hung heavy in the air for much of the Dawn Age, after all, decades and decades and centuries before Yulia Jue raised the Outer Lands. It was in Yulia’s own blood and it hung heavy in her lungs even as she sang. It hangs heavy in Mystearica Fende’s lungs too, now. 

This plague is nothing new. It is simply a natural progression, as natural as aging or death. In Keterberg, Gelda Nebilim notices it, scans the reading, and writes to her former students. Among the three of them, they have a more-than-working knowledge of the Dawn Age, and Jade has always been fascinated by medicine. The miasma, the sephiroth trees, on some deep and intriguing level they are all connected, and solving one problem will solve the other. 

They will find a cure for the plague, a way to reverse the flow of miasma, a method to spare the world, that much is certain as soon as Jade and Saphir sign on to the project. The only trouble is that this work maroons them in their labs, working off of delivered samples and letters. Jade would be useful in Grand Chokmah.

————

Jade is in a secret military laboratory on Feres when three Kimlascan soldiers step into Grand Chokmah with intent to fulfill the Score and stain the throne of Malkuth with imperial blood. The commandant is in Rugnica, pleading with nobles and generals and spinning a half-false Score of destruction. They believe him, he’s easy to believe, but by then it’s really too late. Rugnica is a plain of ashes. Count Gardios of Hod is calling for secession. There are assassins in Grand Chokmah. Bargains and fear-mongering can do little now. 

Peony reads a report on the secession crisis and throws the offending document at a wall, seething. This isn’t the time, he wants to say. Malkuth’s people need help, not crisis upon crisis, but an emperor can only do so much. Malkuth is an unholy amalgam of four-or-more nations that have not forgotten whence they came, and if he tries to rule with an iron fist like his forefathers most of his country will go the way of Rugnica and he will rule over dust and corpses.

He buries his face in his hands at the thought, so he doesn’t see the assassins walk in. They walk in freely because most of the guards that should be stationed around the throne room have been dispatched to help the refugees from Rugnica. Peony’s own safety comes second to that of his people, it always has and it always will. So, when the assassins walk in, he’s alone except for the woman who handed him the report, and he’s not looking at the door. There is a moment of utter silence, just a moment, and then the boldest of the assassins lunges, sword in hand. His companions follow suit an instant later. 

Peony doesn’t react in time. The woman with him, the diplomat, does. Jade Curtiss is a very powerful fonist and a brilliant scientist, and those in his company will always look dim and weak in comparison, but it doesn’t mean that they are remotely incompetent. Nephry won’t ever be as powerful as her brother, nor as mind-bogglingly clever, nor as terrifying, but she is fully capable of casting artes that can throw a grown man through a stone wall, and that’s just what she does. 

One of the assassins manages to nick Peony’s arm with his sword, drawing blood enough to stain his shirt and the throne that he’s fallen back against, but it’s the sort of wound that can easily be healed. The assassins themselves are knocked out cold, and the few guards who remain in the palace rush to arrest them. 

“Idiots,” says Nephry, eyeing them with distaste. “Don’t they know who they’re dealing with?”

 

“Probably not,” says Peony, his voice strained. He grins at Nephry, and tries to disguise a cough as a chuckle and the tightness in his chest as a fight-or-flight response. He doesn’t succeed. It is difficult to lie to Nephry Curtiss. 

————

It’s ND 2019 and the world has not yet ended. Rugnica struggles to rebuild, and Hod secedes. Feres does not. Malkuth loses territory anyway. The emperor lives on. The Kimlascan army retreats. In Daath, the commandant struggles to pick his next move in a game he no longer quite recognizes. The plague spreads through Malkuth, slow and certain. Plagues spare none, not emperors or teachers or noble ladies, but Malkuth’s brightest minds are working toward a cure.


	16. Auldrant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just in time for TOTA's 10th birthday, right? Happy TOTA day. There's only the epilogue to go after this!

The commandant comes to Grand Chokmah, and he’s exhausted. His armor is heavy on his shoulders, and there is an odd tightness in his lungs that he attributes to growing old. He’s not sure how old he is, exactly, but he feels ancient. Peony greets him with a bright smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He looks tired too. They were all so young once– where had the time gone?

“Cantor Grants– it’s wonderful to see you,” Peony says, shaking his hand. “I’m sorry it isn’t under better circumstances.” There is a dark stain on the throne behind him, a stain that doesn’t wash away no matter how hard anyone scrubs. 

“It could be worse,” says the commandant, who has stopped thinking of himself as Luke at some point, because it’s been so long since he’s been Luke Fon Fabre and clearly the boy in Baticul is Luke, is the real Luke, the Luke that’s supposed to be there. Only Professor Nebilim calls him Luke now, anyway. “You survived. We all survived.”

“Lucky that Indignation seems to run in that family,” says Peony dryly. “How is Jade, by the way? He’s not answering my letters.”

“I thought he answered to you,” says the commandant, who has last had any sort of contact with Jade Curtiss when they were both neck-deep in miasma in the mines of Akzeriuth. Peony’s smile turns into a grimace. 

“In theory only,” he admits. In another life, in another world, the commandant remembers them being close. Even then, Jade was the sort of person to engage in entirely unsanctioned adventures and heroics. “You know how he is.” He regards the commandant cautiously. “Now, honestly, have you Scored up another disaster?”

“I don’t know,” says the commandant, honestly, as he tries not to stare at the bloodstain on the throne. That was Scored too, wasn’t it? How had he managed to forget Peony’s Scored death? He hadn’t thought about it, it hadn’t even crossed his mind, not while he had been so wrapped up in descending continents and hyperresonance. Stupid of him. “I don’t want any other disasters to happen, Scored or otherwise. That’s why I’m here.”

————

In ND 2019, Chesedonia secedes too. They do so quietly, apologetically, peacefully– they’re already a semiautonomous territory, so it’s not hard – but it’s clear that the Malkuth empire has lost all control over its states. Duke Fabre calls it victory. King Ingobert smiles, nods, then directs all resources into finding out when Duke Fabre is going to betray him. King Ingobert isn’t stupid, he knows a distressing trend when he sees one, Malkuth may be larger than his country, but Kimlasca-Lanvaldear too was once separate states, and Ingobert’s rightful heir has given up her throne to the son of his most powerful noble. The setup is almost too perfect.

————

The old man doesn’t bring the plague with him into Kimlasca, not really. Miasma doesn’t favor one country over another. Still, his lungs are full of it when he crosses the border, and when he collapses, choking, on the street, he is the first and most dramatic victim. Panic spreads from where he falls like ripples in water. 

It’s from there that information about the plague reaches Baticul, where Meryl and Luke and Natalia learn of what it can do. 

“Oh,” says Natalia distantly. “Like with Aunt Suzanne, only worse.” Meryl frowns. 

“Is there no cure?” she asks. But there isn’t, not one that’s known, and that knowledge grates on Meryl’s every nerve. She doesn’t believe in impossibility, but she does believe in a king and nobles who will sit by and do nothing while their people suffer and die. In another world, another lifetime, they’d call the the People’s Princess. In this lifetime, she is one of the people, their representative and their protector. Helplessness doesn’t become her either way. 

“There’s always something to be done,” says Luke, squaring his shoulders. He doesn’t believe in impossibility either, and sometimes when he forgets to guard his mind he can share the dreams and thoughts of the commandant in Daath. His isofon has been dreaming about fon machines, about Belkend and Sheridan, about hyperresonance and flight. Sheridan is easier to reach, he thinks. He can start there. Anywhere is a start, anything– anything is better than sitting and having tea with Natalia and trying to explain that no one is plotting a coup. 

————

The girl from Hod is waiting for them in Sheridan. Mystearica– Tear. She has a set of Oracle Knights with her, little ones– it takes Luke a moment to recognize Anise and the boy she’d called Sync, what with upgraded uniforms – and she has swapped her long gown for the neat uniform of a Daathic healer. 

“The commandant said you’d come,” says Anise. “He’ll be in Belkend– that’s where everyone else went.” Sync nods silently. He looks even less steady on his feet than he did last time. It’s worrisome. Tear looks uncomfortable.

“It’s in the Score,” she says quietly. “Did you know that? I’ve seen it read– it portends disaster.” The boy in the mask nods again and folds his arms.

“Everything portends disaster,” says Anise with a broad shrug. “It’s boring. Anyway, you’re here now so we’re escorting you to Belkend.” Sync makes a noise that’s either a cough or a snicker, and Tear huffs. “What?”

“Do you really think the end of the world is boring?” Tear asks. Anise shrugs again.

“Well, not if it actually ended, I guess,” she admits, “but the commandant’s got it covered, hasn’t he?”

“You have a lot of faith in him,” Meryl says dubiously, and Luke automatically jumps to his isofon’s defense. 

“It worked out in Akzeriuth, didn't it?” he snaps. Not that he’s entirely sure what happened in Akzeriuth beyond the miasma ceasing to spread, but that’s enough, isn’t it? It’s something, it’s anything, it’s better than nothing. “Belkend? Fine. Okay. Let’s go. What’s the worst that could happen?” 

“Don’t say things like that,” says Tear firmly. Sync cough-laughs again, and leans on Anise’s shoulder. “Terrible things can happen, things even the commandant can’t prevent.”

“You’re a party pooper, you know that?” says Anise, who is apparently unflappable. It’s a poor note on which to set out for Belkend.

————

Belkend is unexpectedly quiet. For a moment Luke thinks he’s walking into a trap, but then he feels rather than hears the commandant step out into the street. The summons rings in his mind rather than in the air, but that’s enough, that’s something. He breaks into a run, with Meryl hanging onto his arm and Anise cussing up a storm behind him, and nearly runs head-first into his isofon. The commandant looks awful, but cracks a grin at the sight of him. 

“Young Master Fabre,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“The plague’s in Kimlasca,” Meryl gasps out by way of explanation, and the commandant’s smile widens. 

“The plague’s everywhere,” he says. “Luckily, we’re not all clutching our pearls and crying over the Score.” A man in Malkuth blue steps out behind the commandant, glances over Luke and his companions, and raises an eyebrow. 

“Saphir’s going to cry if you miss his big speech, you know,” he deadpans. The commandant rolls his eyes and gestures for them to follow him in. 

“Which one’s Saphir?” Anise asks curiously, and the red-eyed man nearly chokes.

“The one giving the speech,” the commandant supplies less than helpfully as he he guides Sync to an appropriate seat. “It’s alright. We made– they made it on time.”

————

In ND 2019, the scion of Lorelei’s power approaches the city of fon machines to neutralize the plague with forbidden power. That’s exactly how it happens. There is the scion of Lorelei – both of them, technically – and they both come to Belkend seeking a solution to the crisis that grips all of Auldrant now. And in Belkend, conveniently, there are masters of forbidden powers– usually one, now a spare for the sake of presenting their shared research and the cure they have discovered. 

Dr Curtiss, dressed in Malkuth blue with his long hair braided back, introduces their first “victim– I mean test subject,” with the pomp and circumstance of a child at show-and-tell. 

“First human test subject,” she corrects with a bland smile. Dr. Gneiss, who has decorated his chair with garlands of flowers, sticks out his tongue.

“First one that counts, in any case,” he says. “It’s meant for human beings.”

Few can follow the specifics of their lecture – afterwards people would swear Dr Gneiss veered into an entirely different language partway through and never really recovered – but everyone understands when Dr Curtiss holds up a vial of shimmering blue liquid and announces a two-part proposal, half prevention and half cure. 

“You want to leave us in debt to Malkuth,” Meryl says suddenly, when Dr Curtiss pauses for effect. He makes a slightly exaggerated gesture of innocence.

“Don’t be stupid,” says Dr Gneiss. “Peony’s not funding us. That’d be partisan.”

“Malkuth isn’t funding us,” Dr Curtiss agrees. “Daath is. We simply serve at the will of Lorelei.”

————

Only one man is recorded dying of the plague, after that– an old man in a small town in Kimlasca who refuses the serum when it is offered. Other than that, it is passed around like water as Oracle Knights drag ancient-looking machines through once-sealed gates and deep into passage rings. No one questions Oracle Knights, and no one questions God Generals– it’s just not done, even when the God Generals in question have eyes like blood or barely come up to your shoulder. 

Auldrant itself seems to shake, when everything is set into place; a low rumbling hum spreads through the ground and the air and the water. Van Grants, watching Hod from across an ocean, thinks for a brief moment that this is it, the damnation he had almost escaped had come for him and for the world, but then the hum recedes into white noise and his former home doesn’t dip below the water’s surface. In Keterberg, the sound is muted by a blanket of snow and the steady calming knowledge that the man on Mount Roneal is one of Keterberg’s native sons. In Daath, they pray, and Giselle Oslo doesn’t tell the crowd to hang the Score and look to the light of the future, just like Maestro Mohs holds his tongue and bows his head. A girl with a faraway look in her eye slips out of Baticul’s shaking gates and only pauses once, to blow her fortress-city a kiss goodbye; it won’t miss her, and Natalia realizes she won’t miss it either. In Grand Chokmah, Peony makes a toast to a better future, and doesn’t say that this one won’t be written in stone. 

That same toast and that same sentiment are echoed around Auldrant, because Lorelei is harmony and song and there are not so many discordant notes as to obscure the melody. Sometime in the future, that day will mark the end of an era, but not the end of a world, the end of a verse but not of a song. 

And so the will of Lorelei resounds.


	17. The End

After that, it’s quiet. It’s not silent– Hod and Chesedonia secede in full, Duke Fabre and King Ingobert trade thinly-veiled threats, Mohs plots and Giselle walks the walls at night in Daath – but it is quiet, strangely quiet. 

A mask inlayed with gold hangs on the wall of Freyr’s room now. If anyone enters, if anyone looks, if anyone asks, he’ll take the fall for being the mysterious Oracle Knight called Sync, though he and his brother wore the mask in equal measure. Ion will never be strong, but regular doses of new medicine allow him to stand and speak and lead without falling. He’s stronger than his father could ever be, and he leads the faithful into a new era. Freyr cuts his hair and sets about reuniting the splintered sects of the Order. He’ll start in Rugnica, where there’s a priestess who talks to monsters. 

Mystearica Fende will never know her brother, but that’s alright. She sings for the Order, and she will never sing them a Score. She sings about the past and the present and the dreams of a future, and sometimes she sings duets with a dark-haired woman who seems totally untouched by Yulia’s word and Lorelei’s. They harmonize well. 

In time, Ingobert will give up his throne to the Scion of Lorelei and Voice of the People, and they will lead Kimlasca-Lanvaldear into an era of unprecedented prosperity. For now, they marry, and there are flowers and gifts and guests from around Auldrant. Meryl Oakland’s parents are there, hearts so full of pride and joy that they seem in danger of bursting. Jozette Cecille lurks behind her Hodian kinfolk and dances once, just once, with the handsome Malkuth officer who is only there as political representative. 

Anise Tatlin never marries a lord, but she argues and steps on toes and will be a Maestro by the time she's twenty, once she learns to ride political sentiment and popular opinion with as much ease as she rides Tokunaga. It comes easily to her, as easily as lying, and she realizes this when she argues Mohs off of his soapbox to resounding cheers.

Emperor Peony never marries. Nephry marries Peri Osbourne, who is steady and sweet and teaches in Keterberg. In that sense, some things don’t change. Nephry travels the world and send letters home to her husband, because Malkuth has more need for diplomats than ever. Her brother’s name is whispered and stories are told, but in each one he’s a hero. There is a fine line, if you think about it, between healing and necromancy– both are ways of fighting death. 

In Sheridan, Class I tests and perfect flying machines. One ascends to the sky above the city and circumnavigates the globe before it lands.

————

How long has it been? Once upon a time, the man who calls himself Luke Grants had been a child, but when had that been? When he doesn’t think about it, it feels like an eternity. But, no, he can count the days, the years, the lost-and-found lives. It had been twenty-five years since he had appeared, choking and sick, in the snow in Keterberg. Before that, what? Another thirty-five of repetition and madness. 

For lack of a physical embodiment of the number to gawk at, the commandant gawks at the wall in front of him. Sixty. Give or take months lost and gained here and there, he’s sixty. The number feels ridiculous, both too large and too small somehow. Surely he has lived forever. Surely he’s still seven– or still seventeen. 

Well, the man he sometimes sees in mirrors or too-polished armor would disagree with the latter sentiment. The gold of his hair and the green of his eyes hadn’t faded with time, but his face is lined with weariness. It’s bizarre. He’d never expected to live to be old. He’d never expected to live. 

When the commandant tenders his resignation at last, a year after that – “Lorelei, people, I’m sixty-one,” he says, and doesn’t say he shouldn’t couldn’t ever be – the announcement is greeted with a party. They’ll miss him, all of his God Generals and all of his soldiers and even the Maestros who have been side-eyeing him for at least a decade now. There’s a cake that’s as big as he is. It’s so ridiculous that he ends up sitting in his office and crying. Like a child. 

Everyone expects him to leave Van in charge. He hands the title of commandant to Giselle and makes her swear what feels like a thousand times to dissolve the God Generals if it is ever asked of her. She would. Van wouldn’t. They are a tool for wartime, and Giselle knows full well that the war is won. 

————

This time he flies to Keterberg. There is none of the old rush to flying, and the girl-pilot Noelle is so young, so young, when she smiles at him he doesn’t actually recognize her for a minute. 

“Get some sleep, if you like, gramps,” she says cheerily, mistaking his exhaustion for one that sleep can fix. “The Albiore V flies as smooth as sailing on a lake.”

“I know,” he says. This Albiore is nicer than the one he remembers, shinier and in better condition. The seats are padded. It even has quieter engines. The difference funding can make, he thinks, and sinks into a seat. 

————

The former commandant wakes in Keterberg, and feels a little like he has come home. It’s not a familiar feeling, but it’s pleasant. Gelda Nebilim is waiting for him, her red eyes warm, and it has been twenty-five years since she was to die young.

“About time you got here,” she says, and offers her arm. He takes it, and they walk in comfortable silence down snow-covered streets as the sun, once again, sinks below the horizon. 

_fin_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *long exhale* And that's it. I hope you all enjoyed _Encore and Improvisation_ , because it's been a wild and lovely ride on my end of things. And now it's done.
> 
>  
> 
> And now I'm going to be obnoxious and ask you to help feed your local starving artist. Fanfic is wonderful and beautiful and I love writing it, but it doesn't pay my keep, so I'd really appreciate it if you guys would check out my actual real world writing. I've got a [book ](https://www.amazon.com/Snows-Haz-Heart-World-Book-ebook/dp/B01AGQZ9YE) (that's also available on like, every other ebook platform) and a [mobile game](https://www.choiceofgames.com/user-contributed/academy-of-disaster/). (And then you can make fun of me for not being able to write anything that doesn't at least a tiny ToTA reference in it, oops.)


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